* * *

Humming somewhat less than tunelessly to himself and happily covered in kank grease, the dwarven engineer Wrong bolted the last of four kruthik-skin wings onto his brand new flying machine’s fuselage. They had outdone themselves, Skarp’s children, truly they had in finding him parts, and as an expression of gratitude he’d designed the plane – originally intended for one – to seat several more than that. They were far, far too young to have experienced the delight of flight and had no idea what they were missing. It was the least he could do for them.

Moments later his singing became a groan as he heard the rumbling of disturbed earth from a corner of his workshop. That would be Skarp, and in a hurry or he would have come in by the door. He knew he owed the old priest the workshop that provided him the only moments of happiness he had known in this gods’-forsaken world. It was Skarp who had led him here and encouraged him to take up his old trade again, with tools the like of which he hadn’t seen in centuries.

But it was a given that he did indeed owe the priest, a debt he could never fully repay, and while Skarp didn’t collect interest often Wrong had a feeling today would be one of those days. And although he knew it wasn’t very honorable, he tried to tuck himself into the shadow of the wing and hide.

“Is that airworthy?” Skarp asked as if Wrong were standing in the middle of the room.

The dwarf crawled out from under the fuselage, wrench still in hand. “No, of course it isn’t! I’ve only just –”

The priest had finished a circuit of the plane. “All the pieces look in place.”

“Well, technically, yes, but I haven’t fully tested her subsystems let alone hauled her out and taken her for a –”

“First flight in half an hour,” Skarp cut him off bluntly.

“That’s – that’s impossible, I –”

The priest tossed him a piece of paper which after he unfolded it with trembling hands proved to be a map of the nearby mountain range. An X was heavily penciled over one of the peaks. “No time for discussion. The children need you.”

“The children?” His heart grew cold as he realized what Skarp was proposing. “No, no, no, there are seven of them and the Dragonfly only seats –”

“I must go back. Plan for refugees from the Seven Pillared Hall as well,” he said as he turned away.

“Refugees? Utterly impossible!” Wrong protested. “I can’t change the laws of physics!”

“There may be none. In fact, I expect there won’t,” Skarp said, a distinct note of sadness in his voice. “But you never know.”

“But – but – but – ”

“Half an hour,” Skarp repeated. Then he was gone.

* * *

“Phaledra, what are you doing?” Surina fretted as Darkseeker hurriedly helped her into her armor. “We must be away!”

The priestess of Erathis turned from her bookshelf. “I at least have to take these,” she said, clutching a pair of tomes to her chest, “and I should –”

Darkseeker grabbed her by the arm, gently but firmly. “We’re out of time. We need to go.”

“You see Phaledra to safety,” Surina said, “and I’ll rouse the town.”

Terrlen thought to argue with her. The temple was the high point of the Seven Pillared Hall. If what he feared was in fact occurring the descent could be dangerous, the ascent even more so. Surina had things to live for – her duty to the priestess, her new-found absorption in the sword style one of the overworlders had brought with her. While he had…but there was no time to debate who deserved the safer path. “See you topside,” he said with a confidence he did not feel and a desire he did not have.

But even as they exited the temple they heard a massive rumbling and then a throaty roar that echoed through the Underdark. The temperature jumped by tens of degrees and Darkseeker swore aloud. “Holy mother Erathis,” Phaledra breathed, “it’s all gone.” Where the Seven Pillared Hall had stood there was now only a crater, filling all too rapidly with molten lava. They could feel the ground shaking under their own feet and the walls around them growing hot, but Terrlen thought they might have just enough time to escape.

Just enough time, that is, until the magma seethed in a dozen places and they found themselves surrounded by a small host of fiery beings. None of them looked friendly. With a snarl Terrlen shifted – he was already gaining some control over his curse – and Surina drew her sword. “I’ll hold them off,” Darkseeker growled, “and you get Phaledra to –”

But the temple guardian was already away, her blade reflecting the eerie shades of the cavern, toward the thickest concentration of foes. “I’ll clear a path!” she called as she ran, but no sooner had Terrlen snatched Phaledra’s hand and made ready to follow than a ten foot column of fire shot up between him and the Dragonborn. Red eyes filled with malice regarded he and Phaledra, and as thick tendrils of flame reached out like arms to enclose them both in a fiery, fatal embrace Terrlen could do no more than leap backward with her to delay the inevitable a few moments longer.

Before it could advance, however, the ground churned in the space Darkseeker had created and a man – or rather a manlike creature seemingly formed of rock – rose out of the earth itself. The angry roar of a conflagration burst from the fire lord’s core and, Terrlen and Phaledra momentarily forgotten, it hurled itself against the newcomer. Watch the ground, the very stones seemed to speak to them, and wait.

Then Terrlen heard other voices as well – distant, and panicked. Turning he could just make out the overworlders ascending from the depths along the only remaining path to safety, and from the shaking of the earth and small eruptions of magma, that for not much longer. Floor, ceiling – every surface bucked and heaved around them. Impossible for them to escape without some casualty, he thought, and a desolate yet strangely welcome thought came to him.

Phaledra had followed the line of his gaze to the youths but misunderstood his expression. She laid a hand on him. “Go to them. I’ll wait for you here.”

He squeezed her fingers where they rested on his arm. “Surina will come for you,” he said.

“Terrlen, you will –” A dawning worry came to her eyes, too late. He was already away, and if she finished her sentence he didn’t hear.

Regan had sprinted to safety by the time he reached them and Saphira was close behind. Sugar Primrose – she seemed to have acquired horns and a tail but he recognized the eyes and who was he, after all, to criticize an altered form – was a middling distance away but crossing the fire and only nearly dodging falling rocks had taken their toll; remaining where she was would certainly kill her but likely so would going forward. “Let me do one good thing,” Darkseeker muttered. Leaping into the flames that separated him from the druid, he picked her up and threw her to safety.

Reign slipped near him but quickly regained her balance and joined her companions worriedly watching Zane, Kerac and Po traversing the collapsing passage, slapping out embers on their cloaks as they came. Regan had drawn a rope from her pack and was conferring with Reign and Sugar Primrose stared into the flames with wide-eyed intensity but only a fool would run back into them.

He winced and groaned softly as fire singed his fur and attacked the skin beneath, skin that the werecurse sought doggedly to heal while doing nothing to dull the spreading pain. It took more effort of will than he expected to press on rather than retreat. The spirit might toy with oblivion but the flesh was life’s tenacious ally, and if other, worthier lives hadn’t been at stake flesh might have won the battle.

But they were and so he pressed on; just as he reached Po he heard Sugar Primrose cry out – a shout of determination tinged perhaps with desperation – and a sudden, welcome blast of cold blew up from the ground before them, forming a momentary barrier against the half-molten ground. Zane, Kerac and Po hurried across, Darkseeker following behind them.

Just a few steps from solid ground the crumbling passage finally gave way. Darkseeker might have been able to leap to safety. But why? he wondered. Phaledra is in better hands now than she would have been with me. The Hall is gone, the man I was is gone…There is nothing left. The fall would deliver him straight into the rising sea of magma drowning what was once his home and there was, he thought, some justice in that. Why should the affliction that had been the death of so many be his salvation now? So he let himself fall, his prodigious self-repair prolonging the agony of a fate there was no escaping any longer. And there was, he thought, justice in that too.

Then he heard Sugar Primrose’s high, clear voice, filled with distress beyond measure. “We have to save him!” she cried. He looked up and through the waves of heat saw the druid, the avenger and the paladin teetering deliberately on the edge of the abyss for his sake. Po and Regan looked at one another helplessly; they had few options, all of them bad. Regan prepared to toss the rope that he had once seen snake up a wall under its own power, a magical device that would do no more here than incinerate in the lava. And Po’s hand went to his sword not with the touch of war but in a gesture of healing that Darkseeker had also once seen.

Save the rope! he wanted to call. Save the healing power, save yourselves and Phaledra and Surina! But the noxious vapors choked back the words in his throat. He felt Po’s surge of health flow through him but it was too little, too late. He lacked the strength to catch the rope even if Regan could throw it far enough to reach him; in moments he would lack the flesh, or the awareness, or the life.

A golden light flared above, rushed toward him: a courier to the afterlife, or more likely a comforting hallucination in his final moments. Then it snatched him in a most ungentle manner and, straining with the weight of him and coughing from the hot poisonous gases, flew upward out of the magma. Unceremoniously and more than a little awkwardly Po dropped Darkseeker beside a beaming Sugar Primrose; from the shocked stares of the paladin’s companions and Po’s own bemusement as the wings that sprouted from his shoulders evaporated into golden mist, Terrlen gathered that his facility for flight was newly birthed.

Their tenacity and dedication shamed him. If the ground itself no longer thwarted their escape the enemies the fire vomited forth did, and as a flock of creatures with flaming bat-wings rose from the incinerated town he hauled himself to his feet and made ready to stand with the overworlders. Past the bats he saw the mysterious earthen being still wrestling with its fiery counterpart and past them still Surina nearly surrounded by burning creatures throwing incendiary rocks. No one’s survival was assured or even likely, but still they all continued to fight, for themselves and more importantly for each other.

A knot of conviction formed in Darkseeker’s chest, small but something to hold on to. The time for self-loathing was past. To honor the extraordinary effort the youths had put forth to save him he must help them save themselves. And after that…well, death by his own hand would be a poor repayment of the life debt he now owed.

For a time it seemed his newfound commitment to life would be all too brief. The bats swarmed he and the overworlders, diving in to attack and then swooping back over the magma out of reach. Surina fell, and then their mysterious earthen ally. Reign and Saphira had run ahead but the others clustered together, uncertain where to attack or how to advance.

Then strange, crystalline creatures the like of which Darkseeker had never seen before swarmed out of the walls and ground and launched themselves at the enemy. Apparently impervious to fire, they swept their foes away with ease. Then he heard a voice in his head, low-pitched and musical and brittle like thin glass. “Go up, always up. Beware the Witch.”

They wasted no time taking the beings’ advice. “What was that?” he asked Saphira as they ran.

“Shardmind,” she replied. “I’ve heard of them, but never seen them before. Fragments of the Living Gate, something associated with the World Seed – I’m not certain of the precise connection.”

“Living Gate? World Seed? I’m afraid the explanation,” he said wryly, “is more confusing than the question.”

“I’m sorry,” she panted slightly from exertion as the path’s grade steepened, “I don’t have the time or the energy to explain it now. After we’re out of here, perhaps.”

He marveled at her conviction that they would get out, that there would be a time after this time for idle talk. “Of course,” he said. “Forgive me.”

He also marveled that they met no further opposition for a time, but his rising spirits plummeted as they reached the temple of Erathis and saw Phaledra collapsed on the ground. Darkseeker increased his pace, but Kerac and Regan were ahead of him. Kerac was kneeling beside her and shaking his head when Terrlen caught up. “She’s dead.” The avenger gave him a meaningful glance. “No, I don’t want to leave her either.” She picked up the corpse, then hesitated. “I’ll take her,” the priest said, holding out his arms. “There may be sword work yet to do.” Regan nodded and passed the lifeless body to her companion, then retrieved the two books that Phaledra insisted on taking with her, partly singed but largely sheltered beneath her when she fell.

They climbed for what seemed an eternity but could see daylight beyond a cavern entrance when the shadar-kai fell upon them. They were skilled fighters, and the Witch who led them was a dangerous foe, and they seemed to care not at all that they would die by molten flame so long as the interlopers did not escape. Darkseeker was inclined to despair from their sheer numbers and ferocity even before he heard the sound of some approaching monster from without, but to his surprise the noise, rather than chilling his companions’ spirits, lifted them. “Wrong with his flying machine!” they cried with an astonishing certainty in their good fortune. “We have to get to the ledge!”

Truer words were never spoken, as a rumbling from the ground made it plain that the lava was still rising and time running out. Regan and Zane moved to block a passageway through which more shadar-kai were attempting to emerge and Sugar Primrose threw down a thorny wall in a corner of the room, buying them crucial moments to retreat toward the exterior. Seeing Kerac considerably burdened by Phaledra’s body Darkseeker dropped back and relieved him of the corpse; he heard Regan swearing as, misunderstanding how long the exchange would take, she had retreated and left Zane alone.

Still they managed to evacuate to the ledge and Zane warded the door against the shadar-kai with an arcane lock as the others scrambled up into a strange machine resembling a dragonfly in both form and, Terrlen thought doubtfully as it bounced and rocked, fragility as well. The dwarf pilot tried to keep the craft some semblance of stable even as he threw down parachutes and ropes, but each additional weight brought it perilously close to crashing. “I need more manpower!” he cried. “Someone get up here and start pedaling!”

Reign and Po clambered up immediately. Darkseeker, still holding Phaledra, hesitated. “Give her to me,” Regan said, fishing the magical rope out of her pack and tying it around her waist and then to the dangling cable. “They need your strength up there.”

Kerac had taken a passenger seat and Sugar Primrose parachuted away. Zane, last through the door, was heading for the flying machine and Saphira had just settled her parachute on her back when the sealed door burst open and the wall along with it: the lava had finally found its own way to the open air. Darkseeker cried out as Wrong steered the copter steeply upward. “Pedal harder!” the dwarf shouted.

“Saphira and Zane!” he shouted as he watched them tumble toward the edge and certain death.

“Nothing we can do, lad!” the engineer shouted back. “Unless we want to die with them!”

Terrlen’s last, relieved sight before Wrong swung the dragonfly away from the exploding mountaintop was of Saphira snatching Zane at the very last moment before he went into freefall, pulling a cord on her chest and shooting past them to begin a gentle descent.

* * *

The machine limped back to Wrong’s workshop with a tattered, smoldering wing and other damage, and it took Saphira, Zane and Sugar Primrose some time to make their way there, but shortly after arriving they made preparations to return Phaledra to life and Darkseeker could find no words to express his gratitude. Consciousness was slow in returning to the priestess, and he remained at her side until it did.

“I – I was – the Hall was – ” Seeing Darkseeker beside her she reached out for his arm. “Where is Surina?” She tightened her grip as he turned his head aside. “Terrlen?”

“Phaledra, you’ve been through a great ordeal, you should rest –”

“I won’t rest until I know, Terrlen. Something has happened to her, hasn’t it?”

He took her hand from his arm and held it within his own. “I saw her fall at the crater’s edge – ”

She snatched it away and bit at her knuckle, tears coming to her eyes. “Surina. Oh gods – why did you abandon her body and not mine?”

Before he could even being to ponder how to explain that her body was consumed by the magma a soft voice spoke from the doorway. “She was with Opa Skarp.” Regan had slipped unnoticed into the room and came to stand beside them. “I believe she lives.”

“Who?” Darkseeker asked.

“The figure you saw fighting the fire lord.”

Terrlen pursed his lips, looking nervously at Phaledra’s hopeful face. “But I saw him fall as well.”

“By his own design. You may be certain of that.”

“But – but how do you know?” Phaledra said in a voice weak not only from fatigue.

“He asked me if Surina was worth saving. I said yes.”

The priestess held out her hand. “Erathis bless your kindness, child.”

“I didn’t do it out of sentiment,” Regan frowned. “I barely know the woman.” She withdrew the book of kata from her tunic, its cover battered and pages burned at their edges. “She was willing to study, willing to learn. There’s something important here, something we need to remember. Something we need to disseminate.”

Wrong bustled into the room and began making shooing motions at Darkseeker and Regan. “I’m no doctor, but Kerac is, and I’m sure if he weren’t so busy studying the mysterious shaft at the back of my workshop he’d be saying that this young lady needs rest. So out with you, both of you!”

Reluctantly Terrlen let himself be separated from the priestess, murmuring to Regan as they left, “If Surina is alive, why hasn’t she been returned to us?”

“I can’t answer that. But if she is dead, then Opa Skarp died with her.”

“You are certain? You know him that well?”

“He is the only father I ever had.” She tucked the book back out of sight and her expression grew closed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

* * *

“This is as far as I go,” the Jura Dai who had silently seen Darkseeker and Phaledra on a days’-long journey across endless desert from Wrong’s workshop to the outskirts of the city called Urik said. They had tarried with the dwarf and the overworlders but Surina never appeared. Wrong let them remain while he and the other overworlders made ready some manner of expedition, but when their time of departure approached he assured the last survivors of the Seven Pillared Hall that they would be safer in a city with friendly eyes to watch over them. “My kind is – unwelcome – in the city.”

Phaledra grew pale but said nothing about their abrupt abandonment, while Darkseeker set his jaw in grim determination and nodded. “Do not be afraid.” A voice came from what even Terrlen’s keen eyes had taken for a small boulder before the boulder unfolded into a severe woman with short-cropped hair wearing a dusty, hooded cloak. “I will see you past the gates.” She handed each of them a small packet. “These are your papers. Please do not speak unless spoken to, and then only briefly.” She raised a hand as Darkseeker opened his mouth. “I’m sure you have many questions, but I would prefer not to begin answering them until you are safely settled at an inn. It is unwise to be seen tarrying outside the walls.”

“Particularly in the company of the Jura Dai,” their escort said dryly.

“Each day we draw closer to the day that will change,” the woman said, and Phaledra priestess of Erathis thought she heard an undertone of almost religious reverence.

“Perhaps,” he shrugged. “Until then, we survive as we may.” Without another word he turned and ran back into the desert, and only then did the two refugees see how much they, even Darkseeker, had slowed him down in their company.

“Come,” the woman said. Her tone was not unfriendly, but also brooked no argument and she took up a brisk walk toward the walled city without looking back to see if they were coming. Clasping hands almost unconsciously, the priestess and the werewolf followed their guide into their strange new world.

Klavicus waved a hand at her. “Explain. I have something to attend to for a moment.” Then he rose and moved to the altars, displaying something she could not see or hear.

The bard received her recitation calmly enough; Mahlanda was astonished at the stabilizing influence Klavicus had on him. The very aspects of the Preserver’s personality – his arrogance, his coldness, his peremptory manner – that kept her feeling perpetually off-balance seemed a balm to Hanen’s fevered brain.

When he first saw the Avangion, and the Avangion spoke of the Dragon, the viewing altars abruptly fell dark and silent as he scrabbled backward away from them like some oversized, demented cockroach. Days passed in which he alternated between mania and catatonia, babbling in languages Mahlanda did not understand or perhaps in no language at all. Afraid to leave him alone lest he damage Klavicus’ library, she spent long, weary hours keeping him confined to the space in which the daimon found him or, when the manic episodes subsided, trying to coax him to take a little food.

Tonight he ate like the starving man he was, the meal’s alien ingredients familiar to him and apparently cementing Klavicus’ identity in his mind. The daimon’s liberality with the wine, she supposed, wasn’t hurting matters any. He looked bemused at her description of defilers and preservers, and sometimes she thought she caught a flicker of hysteria in his eyes, but either self-discipline or the port kept it dampened.

She was just cataloging the extent of the desert wastes when Klavicus returned. “I need you to go to Urik,” he said, holding out a folded piece of paper. “Contact the Jura Dai and tell them to send a scout to this location immediately. If the dwarf in residence there appears to be having an impromptu party within the next few days, the scout should offer his assistance.”

Mahlanda rose immediately, accepted the paper and bowed her head. “Of course, Preserver.”

* * *

Hanen took a smug, unapologetic pleasure at the distress on Mahlanda’s face when Klavicus packed her off; it was nice to see someone else unbalanced for a change. He felt pleasantly full from familiar food, pleasantly relaxed from familiar wine, and if he didn’t think about it too hard he could almost imagine himself living in a familiar time, a familiar world. “Crushed by the deprivation of your company?” he asked.

Klavicus grunted. “The Urikite authorities have never been friendly to the organization of which she is a part, and after the little interrupted interlude you spied on persecution has reached a quietly fevered pitch. Never do that again, by the way.”

“Klavicus Starton the Third: wizard, scholar, staunch defender of the right to be left alone, dispatching minions like a commander, or a liege lord.” The world spun with pleasant gentleness around the bard and made him reckless. “Daimon, Preserver, Great One – what –?”

The daimon picked up an empty wine bottle and looked for a moment as if he meant to hit Hanen over the head with it. “I’d drop that line of inquiry if I were you.”

Hanen was drunk, but not suicidal. “All right then. Who’s the dwarf?”

“His name is Wrong.” Klavicus returned to the air altar, and with only a little more concentration on putting one foot correctly in front of the other than usual Hanen joined him.

“Ah, the Last Paladins,” he said as seven familiar young forms shimmered like smoke and then solidified in the view.

“The First, technically,” the Preserver corrected him, “of this age.”

Of this age. Hanen didn’t want to think very hard about that. “And the dwarf?”

“An engineer.”

“Engineer?” The bard laughed and then pressed his fingertips against a chair to steady himself. Had enough wine, maybe. “When did the gnomes decide to share the trade?”

“There are no gnomes.”

Hanen looked for signs that the old balor was joking. Failing to find them, he gripped the chair back more tightly, a little of the wine-fortified sanguinity bleeding away. He watched as the youths unpacked a number of strange items that the dwarf received with obvious delight. He held up something that looked like a cross between an animal skin and an insect carapace and stretched it between his hands. “Perfect, just perfect!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t ask for a better wing skin.”

He carried the materials with something close to reverence to a back chamber that opened out into a space wider than Klavicus’ capacious residence. Cabinets lined the walls and wheeled work tables cluttered with strange tools were scattered throughout the area but a large concentration of them were clustered around an object bearing some resemblance to the skeleton of a massive bird. “Wing skin?” Hanen said. “What is he doing?”

“Building a flying machine.”

“A flying –?” Again the alcohol let him push the thought away, but he was beginning to wonder if he would ever be able to face this world sober.

The young people were paying scant attention to the machine and instead were staring with wonder at the empty air. “How can it be so cool in here?” Kerac wondered, tracing a path to the back of the cavern where an unnaturally circular darkness yawned in the floor. Air from the shaft blew past Kerac strongly enough to disturb his hair. Wrong came and stood beside him. “What’s down there?”

The dwarf’s shoulders sagged and his gaze grew mournful. “I don’t know. I’ve never found a rope to go deep enough. Isn’t it strange, that we have become the Eloi,” he murmured.

“The what?” Hanen said.

Klavicus leaned forward intently, pulling the dwarf’s face into closer relief. “I think,” he murmured, “that you and I need to have a chat, little man.”

“A piece of history that still eludes you?” The bard failed to keep a certain bitterness out of his voice.

“Fiction. A novel –” Hanen saw the balor’s recognition of his ignorance of the word, “a story, of two post-human races. The Morlocks live in subterranean caverns, tending machinery and seeing to the physical well-being of the aboveground Eloi. The childlike Eloi appear to have a carefree, idyllic existence – save for its ending, on the Morlock dinner table.”

Hanen’s lip curled in disgust. “That’s horrible. Why would anyone tell such a tale?”

“Dystopia was quite the fashion during certain ages of mankind.” He grew distracted again. “I knew of the dwarf, of course, but I didn’t realize he was old enough to have read Wells.”

“How old is that?” the bard asked wearily. The comfort of good food, good wine and familiar company was fading, black depression creeping like mist to take its place.

Klavicus told him.

“I think – ” Hanen suddenly felt the walls, or the weight of lost millennia, closing in on him, “I need to – how in the Nine Hells does one go outside here?”

* * *

Klavicus kept half an eye on Hanen, making certain he didn’t wander away, as he cleared the table and then returned to his reading. The bard kicked at the sand, found stones to throw, intermittently threw himself on the ground howling with a high-pitched ferocity that would have done coyotes proud if any still lived to hear. With fatigue and returning sobriety he eventually settled down, and he had been staring at the night sky for several hours before Klavicus joined him. He stared for nearly an hour longer before he spoke. “How did it happen? The moon?”

Klavicus sighed. He knew this conversation was inevitable – the moon had been a single whole when Hanen was last alive – but he still didn’t relish it. “Tenser broke it, when he fell.”

The bard turned toward him now, eyes as wide and round as the moon before its breaking. “Fell? Tenser is gone?”

The daimon nodded reluctantly. “Fighting the Dragon at its creation.”

“He lost?” Klavicus nodded again. “What about the rest of the Circle?”

“Otiluke was never accounted for after the battle, but neither has he been seen since.” He looked out across the desert. “I’d be very surprised if Rary wasn’t out there – somewhere – but I have had no word of him, only – signs.”

“Signs?”

“When the desiccating effect of defiler magic became known, the Bright Desert suddenly expanded very, very rapidly.”

Hanen pursed his lips. “Rary anointing himself best of breed.”

“That was the common belief, but I’ve always wondered.” Klavicus was silent for a time. “If I wanted a hidden enclave, a small bastion of normality, I might do something not dissimilar.”

“I think you’re projecting more benign motives on Rary than he deserves.” The bard fingered a brilliant white flower that had burst into bloom shortly after Klavicus emerged. “Based on what you yourself have done.”

* * *

Hanen expected any number of responses for painting Klavicus in a more benign light than Rary: petulance, irritation, outright annoyance. Instead, the old balor’s face was what on anyone else he would have called mournful, and his voice was soft and sad. “No, that is not what I have done.” He rose abruptly. “We’re going inside.”

“I’ll be in –”

“Now,” Klavicus informed him.

The bard stood and dutifully followed him. In many ways – enough for sanity’s sake – the demon was the same as Hanen remembered him. But there were subtle and mildly disturbing differences as well: aloofness become melancholy, imperiousness become authority, curiosity become purpose. He had refused to show his balor form. And the flowers…something about the blossoming flowers disturbed Hanen. In the past he would have found a way to wheedle, trick, or tease out answers to his many questions, but now Klavicus seemed…different. Or perhaps Hanen himself was. Dusting the sand from his trousers, he followed the demon through the cleverly hidden door.

It was several days and several bouts of drinking later before he joined Klavicus at the elemental altars. That, at least, was another familiar scene. It had been like this before, during the other sundering of the multiverse. As part of that bargain with the elements the balor had sold Hanen into a sort of bardic servitude. What am I alive for now? With an effort of will he pushed the thought away; he was neither drunk enough to meet the question with equanimity nor sober enough to consider it rationally. And so he sat quietly as images drifted by on the altar of Air: the seven youths fitting an ornate silver key into an elaborate door, on the other side a skeletal figure greeting them, missing its left hand and eye. “The Aspect of Vecna?” he said in surprise.

“Curious,” Klavicus murmured.

The Aspect was speaking now. “The secrets of the tower come at a price: lore, power, your souls.”

“I doubt if the souls will be forthcoming,” the daimon remarked, and indeed the more studious among the young paladins began searching their memories for obscure bits of history, theology or arcana that might be of interest; judging from a moment’s collective disorientation before the Aspect dismissed them, they were not entirely successful, but successful enough to gain entrance to the inner sanctum. Klavicus shook his head and frowned.

“What?” Hanen asked.

“A defiler with the patronage of Vecna, and…” he trailed off. The bard looked at him expectantly. “Suppositions, hypotheses,” he finally said. “Skarp’s sudden interventionist interest, what has sustained the Seven Pillared Hall and its extinct magics for all of these millennia…even if this goes well, it could go badly, and if Paldemar indeed stands at a certain crossroads of powers, it could go not well at all.”

“You know I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the bard said irritably.

Abandoning his preoccupations Klavicus turned to him and smiled, a familiar condescending grin within that unfamiliar face. “That, at least, remains unchanged from the past.”

They watched as the youths descended to an antechamber then murmured about which of its doors to open first. Most heads nodded toward the right, but no sooner had Saphira crept to the door and silently opened it than a servant of Paldemar greeted them. “The Master will see you,” he said. Casting worried looks among themselves and exhaling a collective breath, they followed.

Klavicus shook his head at the scene that confronted them. Paldemar stood in a room filled with crystal pillars, facing a large idol of Vecna with something glittering in its eye. Power surged between the renegade wizard and the idol, and he was enclosed in a glittering shield of force. He paid virtually no attention to their arrival.

“He seems confident,” Hanen said.

“He should. That’s a piece of the World Seed in the idol’s eye.”

“A piece of the –” Hanen stuttered to a halt. “Then it was ruined in the struggle to possess it, this time?”

“The Dragon didn’t want to possess it, he wanted it broken beyond repair. That’s why his grip on the world has been so successful, so sustained. And the defilers in turn learned his lesson well: that it’s easier to destroy a thing than to keep it.”

Hanen’s heart sank anew. “But if there is no hope –”

“Easier, I said,” Klavicus cut him off sternly. “And though the Dragon may believe the Seed broken beyond repair, he is wrong. We have found a way.”

In his still partly drunken distress Hanen only barely registered the we, like a misplayed note in a complex song. And now that Paldemar’s offer of leniency in return for surrender had been soundly rejected, battle began with a vengeance, with the defiler an island of eerie calm in the midst of the storm. Regan and Reign locked down the guards while the others at Kerac’s urging tried to reach the eye. Columns erupted if the young people drew too near, eliciting a peculiar smile from Klavicus when Sugar Primrose cried out in frustration, “I hate pillars!” Every enemy they killed served only to strengthen Paldemar, and their every attempt to reach the Seed fragment was repulsed with a lazy flick of his hand whose effect was yet sufficient to slam them into the back wall.

Kerac was lying dazed when Opa Skarp appeared, absorbing a blow that would have killed the young cleric. “Paldemar knows what he has,” Klavicus observed. “And now he knows that Kerac knows too.”

“How can they possibly stand against him?” Hanen asked as Paldemar, still showing no signs of strain, redoubled his attack.

“Skarp is not someone to be trifled with. Still,” he muttered the last nearly under his breath as Zane and Po flew unwilling across the room, “I should have gone.”

At Skarp’s instruction he and Kerac stood together, hands linked, as Paldemar continued his assault with no sign of slowing. “We are not paper to be crumpled and tossed aside,” the old priest intoned. “We are not wood to be burned.”

For every blow that landed Skarp took the brunt; he was strong, but clearly weakening when Sugar Primrose finally found her opening and wrenched the Seed from the idol’s eye. She started to leap back down but Skarp ordered her to hold, then throw the Seed directly at Paldemar. It tore through both shield and Paldemar himself as if they were paper, but when it reached Kerac’s outstretched hand it flowed into him and vanished. “His arm!” Hanen gasped. “It’s turned to stone.”

“That is the way,” the daimon said. “Skarp, as you can see, has a similar appearance. He has been tracking and absorbing Seed fragments for some time. So far as we know the Dragon and his minions have lacked the imagination to conceive of such a restoration process.”

“How did anyone think of it?” Hanen leaned forward as ground on which Skarp and the young paladins stood began to shake with some violence. “And what’s happening there?”

“It took no great theoretical acumen to recognize it as a viable possibility. As you might recall, Ammet’s brute overdrawing on the Seed to fuel his wretched power created a number of stress fractures reparable only with blood. We thought perhaps a suitably prepared elemental priest could take the fragments into himself and serve as a kind of host until all could be assembled. It was decided more recently that, in case the Dragon gains awareness of the process, an additional host would be prudent.”

“But if –” he broke off as the youths stumbled as the floor rolled and lurched beneath their feet. “The tremors are growing rapidly worse.”

“Yes, they are. It appears to be an unavoidable side effect of the absorption process – localized disruptions in atmospheric or tectonic stability. In this case –”

“You must flee this place,” Skarp was saying. “The magma will be rising.” He began to sink into the earth. “I will join you when I may. Beware the shadar-kai!” he called as he disappeared.

“– the magma is likely to rise,” Klavicus concluded.

“We have to warn the Hall,” Regan said as they ran from Paldemar’s stronghold, retracing their path through the Underdark’s depths, broken ground spewing lava close upon their heels. “There might still be time.”

“There is not,” the daimon said softly, remaining in his seat to watch as Skarp’s brood at last reached the high ground above the Seven Pillared Hall and saw only a crater rapidly filling with lava. Halfmoon’s Inn, Gendar’s store, Orontor and all the mages and the extravagant flow of water through the center of the town were swallowed by liquid fire. Only the Temple of Erathis stood above the devastation, and it too would be consumed soon enough.

Regan stared bleakly at the waste. “They’re all gone.”

“That was our way out,” Kerac said. “Now what?”

Sugar Primrose looked around then pointed. “We go up. The way we were never supposed to go.”

“Because of the shadar-kai,” Zane said.

* * *

Klavicus had seen enough; it was all over but the fleeing, and if he felt inclined he could observe that later at his leisure. He had some research to do and then, he thought with no small resentment, he would need to sleep. He left the vision running hoping it would keep Hanen occupied, but the bard rose and followed him. “I have a question,” he said. The daimon picked up a book, settled into a chair and began to read. “Regarding these – hosts.”

Sighing, he laid the book aside. “You want to know what will happen when all of the fragments have been gathered and the Seed must be reconstructed.”

Hanen ran a hand through his hair. “Well, yes. Can both of them survive the process? Can either?”

The old balor shrugged. “It’s never been tried before. Perhaps it won’t even work.”

“I don’t suppose,” the bard scowled, “that you bothered to warn that young man of the risks.”

“I, as I have recently been reminded,” he snapped with some testiness, “am not responsible for the execution of that particular plan or for its participants, willing and cognizant or no.” He snatched up his book and opened it. “Take it up with the Galeb Duhr and the Avangion if it offends your delicate sensibilities.”

“I thought this Avangion was supposed to be some sort of paragon of goodness and light.”

Klavicus snorted. “That’s Mahlanda and her ilk talking. Simple, desperate people need simple, simpering saviors.”

“He sounds ruthless. I’m not sure I’d like him if I met him.”

“I’m not sure why you would. You never did before.” The daimon took no little perverse satisfaction in the open-mouthed stare Hanen gave him, but before the bard could say anything waved him away. “I’m busy. Go find yourself some other entertainment.”

Mahlanda’s head had been shaved completely bald when he first met her, but now loose brown curls fell along the nape of her neck. It made her softer, more waiflike. He wasn’t sure he liked it, especially when, as now, she looked frightened. She took an involuntary backward step, shaking her head slowly. “I sent no message – I wouldn’t have known where to send it. And there is a madman here, but I certainly didn’t bring him. I only let him remain because said he knew you, and invoked the name of Skarp –”

“Damn you,” he swore, making an impatient gesture as her face reddened in uncertain shame. “Not you. Skarp. I should have known.”

* * *

Twilight was descending on the Vale and Klavicus had already told Desverendi he would be leaving on the morrow when Opa Skarp arrived. “If you are willing, I require your eyes, Avangion,” the earth priest said after exchanging brief pleasantries.

“Don’t call me that,” Klavicus snapped, and behind the daimon’s back Desverendi raised his stony brow in warning.

Skarp was the youngest of the surviving elder beings and in spite of his youth the least adaptive in many ways. As humanity grew ever more feral it became obvious to the earth elementals that the sole way to raise up true champions would be to train their own. Skarp was the most suitable candidate because he had once been and still looked the most human; the second most suitable, technically, but Klavicus expressed in the strongest possible terms what he thought of spending even a single mortal lifetime changing infant diapers and wiping runny toddler noses and they were forced to look elsewhere for a surrogate. And so the task fell to the priest with the balor, as he often reminded them, graciously tutoring him in the art of passing among mortals as one of their own. If the lessons didn’t take very well it proved not to matter: growing up with Skarp from infancy the children took his peculiarities as the usual way of things.

None of the earthen, straightforward and plain-spoken as they were, had an easy time with Klavicus but Skarp, who saw no value in dressing simple truths in fancy costumes, had the most uneasy time of all. Especially now – although Desverendi and the Galeb Duhr had explained several times Klavicus’ likely sensitivity to being called an Avangion, in the old priest’s mind it was what the balor was now, no point in calling a spade a club. But he recognized Desverendi’s disapproval, and made a mental note to refrain from further use of honorifics.

“I assume you want to watch the progress of your urchins,” Klavicus remarked as laid wood and kindling for a fire.

“The Veiled Alliance has had no word of them in some time,” Skarp said.

“They have found their way into the Underdark,” Desverendi put in. “And found an intact stronghold.”

“The Underdark?” the old priest repeated. “But if it is still occupied perhaps we must look for…” he stared at his stony hands as he trailed off, then looked over at Klavicus.

“The whelps are already there, aren’t they?” the daimon snapped. “And no, I don’t have every surviving entrance to the Underdark mapped out in my head. It was a dreary place full of tiny minded Lloth-worshippers as likely to use books to line their nests as read them.”

Skarp and Desverendi let the matter drop. Nascent Avangion or no, Klavicus still possessed a formidable temper. They watched in silence as the daimon rapidly replayed images that he and Desverendi had already seen, slowing for dramatic effect as the youths, venturing deeper into their accidental prison, nervously followed a thin red trail broadening to a stream spilling into a pool of blood. Three ghosts oozed from the pool at their approach: a human with a half-shredded torso and a heavily armored dwarf who kept his faceplate closed whose surplices identified them clerics of Kor and Pelor respectively. They were accompanied by a robed elven woman carrying a staff. “You are come to the Proving Ground for the demon lord Baphomet,” they intoned. “Power beyond reckoning is granted to those who succeed at the trials.”

“Interesting,” Klavicus mused. Desverendi gave him a quizzical glance. “Baphomet was killed, millennia upon millennia ago, by some – tenuous – acquaintances of mine. On Thanatos itself, while serving as a kind of indentured servant to Orcus as punishment for some ill-considered scheme. That should have been a permanent extinction, I would have thought, But I admit I ceased paying much attention to Abyssal matters shortly after and –” he broke off as Skarp added his stare to Desverendi’s. “Personal curiosity,” he mumbled. “Never mind.”

“Trials?” Kerac was asking. “Could you be more specific?”

The ghosts studied the living before them with expressions suggesting they found them wanting. “Not very impressive looking,” the cleric of Kor sniffed. The elven woman nodded in agreement.

“We’re not the ones who are dead, are we?” Po snapped back.

“It might be best for you,” the dwarf said in a more kindly voice, “if you turned around and forgot you ever came here.”

“Seeing as we can’t get back out,” Zane put in, “that’s easier said than done.”

After further coaxing and a few demonstrations of skill the ghosts relented. Find four items – mask, tome, bell, blade. Once found place them on four magic runes – simultaneously. “Want to take any bets,” Regan murmured to Sugar Primrose, “that the runes aren’t particularly near each other?” The druid shook her head and sighed.

“Assuming you survive the runes,” the elf stilled eyed them with skepticism, “you must challenge and defeat the guardian.”

“Which is?” Reign asked.

The cleric of Kor grinned, a little unpleasantly. “Only a green dragon.”

“Oh, and don’t forget the crushing sphere of force that rolls through the inner chambers,” the elven woman added.

Their smugness faded a little when the young paladins asked if they had failed the trials. “Yes,” the Pelorite sighed. “And if you lack the strength of will you’re subjected to a terrible curse, to remain here forever and instruct new challengers in the ways of the place.”

They took their leave of the specters after receiving some clues as to where the items lay: one each to the north, the west and the south of the crossroads where they now stood, the book on an altar at a small shrine to the east.

After some small disagreement about the next course of action, they decided to finish clearing out the gnolls in hopes of finding the two remaining Unspoken. Instead they found two tiefling, trapped when the stone doors slammed down. Reign was happy to take them along if they could make themselves useful, although most of the party eyed them with deep suspicion. “They look able enough,” Skarp observed.

“Yes, they do,” Klavicus agreed amiably. “Which will make them all the more inconvenient to dispatch when they finally decide to turn on their new companions.”

“You do have a suspicious mind,” Desverendi said.

“I know tieflings,” the daimon shrugged.

In fact they made themselves useful almost immediately, aiding in the assault of a gnoll priestess and her troublesome demonic guardian protecting the altar on which rested Baphomet’s book. “What is Po doing?” Skarp wondered as the paladin made a dash for an altar while his companions still wrestled with the guardian.

“Impulsive little man, isn’t he?” Klavicus remarked dryly.

Kerac was less sanguine in his response. “How about we wait?” he snapped at the paladin. Po grumbled but stopped his advance; just as well, since Saphira indeed had some work to do before the book could be safely removed.

Rather than the slaves they hoped for, the youths found themselves accosted by an imp offering to answer three questions for a suitable price – blood or gold, their choice. Sugar Primrose wrinkled her nose and held out coins, receiving in turn information about the rooms where the three remaining items could be found. “What kind of twisted game is this?” Skarp asked.

“Demon’s game,” Klavicus replied. “The more baroque and pointless the better.” He passed quickly through the imp’s smug, smirking recitation. “Hall of Mirrors, Hall of Howling Pillars, Hall of Blood, yes, yes, yes,” he grumbled. “Let’s see them in action.”

Cautiously the young people made their way further into the trial chambers. Wherever they went whispering voices followed them and trails of ghostly blood appeared underfoot and then faded again, setting them all on edge. Saphira opened one room and jumped back, startled, at finding a cowering man in leather. Though she quickly realized it was another spectral visitation it was no easier to watch as three carnage demons came upon him. One of the evil creatures uttered a guttural incantation, though the feat should have been beyond him. The discovered man gave a hideous cry as his femur ripped itself from his leg, shrieking still as the other demons swarmed him and carried him away. The living eyed one another uneasily, all too aware that soon their fates could be written in ghostly ink within these walls, then shrugged and set their shoulders. “Only one way out,” Desverendi murmured sympathetically, “and that is through.”

They explored the central rooms before retrieving the remaining items, finding a deeply pitted oval track where the force ball would doubtless materialize and discovering that as they expected the runes were isolated from one another. “How quaint,” Klavicus growled as the young people discussed each room’s peculiar features. “One for a rogue, one for a mage, two for the religious types. Such originality.”

“New to them, it seems, and no less deadly for all of that,” Desverendi suggested.

“Still, makes one ashamed to be a – ” he snarled and cut himself off and once again Desverendi and Skarp exchanged worried glances.

It was in the room that housed the Bloodhorn Blade that the tiefling turned. It was tailor made for betrayal: filled with a blood toxic to humans but a balm to demons, guarded by two giant, mechanized statues of gnolls wielding chains, their prize tantalizingly out of reach at the far end of the room. While the brawnier among them set to breaking the statues the casters whittled away at a trio of dangerous carnage demons. In the chaos Zane found himself alone, and in his moment of apparent vulnerability the tiefling struck. “Hoping to reduce the numbers to something more favorable,” Klavicus said.

“The children will not permit it.” With a note of pride in his voice and a slight smile Skarp watched as Kerac, Sugar Primrose and Saphira turned on their erstwhile allies with a ferocity that surprised even the tiefling in their last remaining moments of life.

Although once again calls went out reminding the eager to wait for Saphira to retrieve the blade, the worst moments – in this room, at least – were behind them. And though the others were eager to escape the poisonous, bloody pools Sugar Primrose virtually danced through them and seemed loathe to leave. “It feels nice,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

Desverendi’s expression was no less suspicious than Sugar Primrose’s companions as he turned a wary eye to Klavicus. “What is the meaning of this?”

The daimon returned his gaze all wide-eyed innocence. “They have obtained the book and the blade, and require only the –”

“That is not what I meant.”

“Who can say? Well, let’s skip ahead to the next morning, shall we?” Klavicus said in a breezy tone.

“Let us not,” Desverendi rumbled, stone and ice in his words, and though Klavicus grumbled he let the scene play out a little longer.

Sugar Primrose paced long after her companions had fallen into deep, exhausted sleep. Strange lights flickered in her eyes, now red, now silver, now gold. “Well, why not?” she murmured. Highlights of blue and purple and red glinted in her hair. She slipped away into the blade room and cupped the dark blood – pain to her friends, life to her – in her hands. “I don’t have to be evil. I won’t.”

“A tiefling,” Desverendi muttered.

“It’s all over but the changing now,” Klavicus said, jumping ahead in time to the party’s arising. Her companions were not subtle in their surprise at finding their demure human druid transformed into muscular bronzed creature with sharply pointed teeth, horns and a five foot long tail. “Oh look, she has my eyes,” he observed, studying the solid golden irises set in a face framed by midnight blue hair.

“I am not amused,” the old druid’s voice grew colder still. “What have you done?”

“I am sure,” Skarp interjected mildly, “that the Preserver would not interfere with a protégé of yours on purpose.”

“I might,” Klavicus said with a note of insolence. Desverendi’s eyes narrowed. “But I’d be gloating if I had.”

Desverendi clenched a rocky fist, then relaxed it again and sighed. Through the long, delicate dance of negotiations the Galeb Duhr and the Avangion conducted to win the ancient balor to the preservers’ side no one pretended he would be easy to deal with. Desverendi had been, in truth, opposed to courting him, but the Galeb Duhr insisted he was too powerful to ignore. Still, at moments like this the old druid could wish that the daimon spent more time at Spinecastle and less at the Vale. “Continue,” he finally said. “Doubtless Skarp would like to see how his students fare.”

In the Hall of Howling Pillars the impatience Po had exhibited ever since the youths were sealed into Baphomet’s trial chambers would no longer be denied. Perhaps it was the atmosphere; certainly the agonized, hateful grimaces of the faces adorning the posts did not encourage tarrying even if they might reward caution. And so when the paladin saw one of the artifacts resting unattended toward a back corner of the hall he acted without waiting for counsel. “I’m going to get that bell,” he announced, springing toward the pedestal.

“Po!” Saphira called out. “I don’t think you should – ”

Her warning was drowned out by a cry of pain. Skarp winced and Desverendi frowned, but Klavicus chuckled. “Does the boy have the bell, or the bell the boy?” The old druid had no idea what the daimon could find amusing. For when Po seized the bell spikes shot out from the handle, impaling his hand. The clapper struck with a force belying the bell’s size and from seemingly nowhere demons appeared in response.

Po pried the bell handle from his hand and gamely joined a combat complicated by the room’s logistics and its occupants. “The pillars are enchanted with a variety of effects triggered by standing too close to them,” Klavicus pointed toward the image. They watched as Kerac and Zane tried to advance past a pillar only to disappear and reappear some distance away, and Sugar Primrose and Reign wince as some noxious vapor shot toward them when they remained too long in one place. “None of them have gone mad yet, that’s something. But of course the temptation is to huddle at the periphery,” he clucked his tongue as a pack of carnage demons closed in on Reign and Po and, bolstered by the proximity of their fellows, redoubled their attacks, “and that causes problems of its own.”

In the end they prevailed, and with only some small interference from the pillars managed to flee the room, but once again their resources were exhausted and they were forced to rest. “You’d think they weren’t trying to free the last of the Unspoken,” Klavicus observed.

“Do they still live?” Desverendi asked.

In reply a room flickered briefly within the flames in overlay above the young people. Two disheveled captives stood paralyzed within a glowing rune, lines of power emanating from them to a gnoll chanting before an idol of Baphomet. “Behold the captive’s imminent future. The priest was exploring the back chamber when your whelps,” he pointed a lazy finger at Opa Skarp, “activated the trials. Now he need only wait for some other rube to engage all the risks and he’ll claim the reward.” He smiled thinly. “To the cheaters go the spoils.”

“But why,” Skarp asked, “if they were only exploring, did they have the Unspoken with them?”

Klavicus shot him an amused glance. “I’ve always said your childlike innocence is what makes you such a delight, Skarp. If you possessed the twisted empathy required to understand the mind of a gnoll you would realize that to them, traveling into a space of worship without suitable sacrifices at hand would be like a human deep sea diving without breathing apparatus or a hiker taking to the high trails without gorp.” The two elementals stared at him blankly. “Never mind,” the daimon muttered, returning to the youths’ progress through the trials.

Because they were cautious, the room containing the mask did not tax their energies. The imp had warned them about the hall of mirrors. Three kinds, he said, ones that hurt you, move you, trap you. Best not to look at any of them. And so they blindfolded themselves and moved together but spread out, always touching a wall. And though the curtains behind which the mask was hidden were shredded in yet another demonic attack, they emerged mostly unscathed.

“And now the runes,” the old priest murmured.

The youths spent some time brooding over who to put where. It was obvious enough from their initial investigations that Zane, Saphira, Kerac and Regan needed to be separated each to deal with a challenge uniquely suited to their talents; where to place the supporting players was a more delicate question. In the end Po stood with Zane in a room with four colored pools; Sugar Primrose and Saphira readied themselves beside one of two ceiling turrets in a space otherwise unadorned save for a scattering of pillars carved with minotaur faces; Kerac and Reign waited in a small room containing an altar and a pair of idols; Regan stood alone amidst skeletons twitching in chains on the floor. On a prearranged count the four placed the relics on the runes. As they expected gates in the entryways slammed down and most rooms’ occupants were isolated from the larger chamber. Except for Kerac and Reign. “Why do the occupants of the altar room have the run of the region?” Skarp asked.

“An interesting question,” Klavicus said. “One possibility comes to mind.” Though Skarp and Desverendi waited for him to reveal his thoughts he pursed his lips and said nothing more.

If the trial played out less optimally than it might have, yet it was not as deadly as it could have been. Zane and Po had the easiest time of it: they expected some manner of being to spawn from the pool of blue water and a water elemental obliged them. It made every effort to hurl them into a nearby pool of bright, noxious yellow liquid but was foiled by the psionic anchor Zane slapped down around himself and the paladin.

“They should have put the druid with the psion,” Klavicus snorted as Po’s blade passed through the elemental doing about as much damage as one might expect to a being formed from liquid. “And the paladin with the bard,” he added as Sugar Primrose discovered that her druidic powers were of little use against the turrets; she could do little more than hide behind pillars as Saphira dodged bolts and disabled the devices.

“But they could not have known,” Desverendi interjected.

“I’ll give you the water elemental, I suppose,” the daimon said grudgingly, “but not knowing that fire and ice were unlikely to harm a mechanical object? I think your affection for them has softened your head.”

Regan was making slow, only intermittent progress at soothing the now animate skeletons, and eyeing them nervously as every failure increased their agitation, but it was perhaps Kerac and Reign who had the worst of the trial. The moment the runes flared a glowing ball of force the width and height of the central hallway flared into existence and began tracing rapid orbits. “And now,” Klavicus snapped his fingers as both the priest and the fighter stared with horror at something on the altar only they could see, “flee.”

Unable to control herself, Reign ran directly into the path of the giant sphere, which knocked her flat and then rolled on its way. Kerac was more fortunate and managed to recover his wits in time to duck into an alcove near where Regan struggled with the skeletons. “They were still trying to fight their way back to the altar when Zane and Po finished dispatching the elemental. All of the gates opened, but before the youths could converge a new threat reared its literal head: the green dragon emerged from the heart of the larger chamber and descended upon the psion and the paladin, and if Po had been more idle than he liked during the conflict with the elemental he had plenty to keep him busy now.

Sugar Primrose, frustrated with her impotence against the turrets waited for the force ball to pass and then hurried to join Zane and Po; Saphira disabled the second turret and did the same. Regan finished off skeletons and she and Kerac managed to fight off their fear and disable the altar. And then…sphere and dragon vanished and the youths looked around in confusion. Klavicus laughed softly. “All of the fear and challenge of confronting a dragon, with none of the reward.”

They had no time to reflect on their disappointment – or relief – however; an ornate door beyond the chained skeletons swung open and screams emerged from farther in. “The Unspoken,” Skarp breathed, nodding in satisfaction as they ran down a passage.

The scene that confronted them played out as Klavicus had earlier displayed it for Skarp and Desverendi: two disheveled captives stood paralyzed within a glowing rune, lines of power emanating from them to a gnoll chanting before an idol of Baphomet. They were clearly the remaining Unspoken. “Knock them out of that rune,” Regan called over her shoulder as she, Reign and Po made for the gnoll and his guards, and the ranged attackers made ready to oblige.

Aside from a moment’s panic when Reign stood too close to the rune and was knocked into it, becoming briefly the gnoll’s conduit for power, the conflict was relatively straightforward. Searching the bodies and the surrounding area they found the manner of news regarding Paldemar that they sought: the rogue wizard stumbled upon some demonic items, sacrificed them to Vecna, gained lordship over a stronghold with a hidden power Paldemar believed he could, with time, bend to his own uses. “Another defiler,” Desverendi said, a certain weariness in his ancient voice.

Klavicus’ expression was unreadable, but Opa Skarp seemed not to have heard. His dark eyes glittered attentively as the youths found a silver key, ornate and glowing with divination magic, and a note: Use the key for our next meeting. “They’ll be taking that back to Orontor,” the daimon said. “And then I suppose he’ll promise them some other bauble to take care of his problem for him.”

“A foe tapping into the energy of Vecna could be very dangerous,” Desverendi said. “And what is this ‘hidden power?’”

The daimon skipped the view ahead. The grateful, reunited Unspoken were preparing to leave the Seven Pillared Hall and return to the surface, the youths were having their usual irritable discourse with Orontor. “I couldn’t say. This is the present.”

“Thank you for your time, daimon,” Skarp said, rising abruptly.

Klavicus extinguished the fire. “I should go with you.”

Trying as the daimon could sometimes be, Desverendi still could not help but be impressed by the fruits of his long millennia of pure observation. Take away his elemental viewing, he mused, and the old balor could probably still predict the future with more perfect accuracy than the rest of us. What ending does he see for us, for the world?

Skarp bowed his head in acknowledgement. “We tend the bones, you the flesh. All is as it should be. And I do not mean to join them. Not yet.”

“I may not be a demon anymore,” Klavicus scowled, “but I still understand infernals – and by extension, defilers – better than all of you stone heads put together.”

“We do not doubt that,” Desverendi rumbled quietly, “but –”

Before he could finish his sentence embers in the fire flared up and a woman’s voice was audible faintly through the spitting. “Madman…dwelling…urgent…”

* * *

Klavicus had designed his residence for a single occupant so it was difficult for Mahlanda not to hear every word exchanged between the daimon and the bard. Hanen seemed doubtful of Klavicus’ true identity and peppered him with questions regarding people and places she had never heard of; the Preserver answered for a time but she thought that Hanen persisted long past the point that prudence would dictate. And when the bard demanded that he reveal himself as a balor Mahlanda decided that perhaps he was a madman. Certainly her own few moments in the presence of that towering, enflamed form convinced that nothing but death awaited her left her with no desire to see it again; anyone who would court it must be of questionable sanity.

She edged closer to the portal, thinking she might flee if faced with that terrible vision again, but all that emerged from the niche where Hanen lay in his delirium was Hanen himself, not on his feet and at a considerably more rapid velocity than a man would naturally move. Only the opposite wall stopped his advance and he lay there dazed as Klavicus followed after, mercifully no larger than man-sized and not on fire but still with a dangerous look in his golden eyes. “I have neither the space nor the time for a mewling coward,” he snarled as he stood over the bard. “Find your feet in this world or crawl out into the desert and die.”

Mahlanda expected Hanen to cower or cringe, but instead he rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at the daimon thoughtfully. “Maybe you are Klavicus.”

The Preserver picked him up by the front of his shirt. “Say ‘maybe’ one more time and I’ll throw you through one of these windows.” But he set him on his feet.

Desverendi studied the prone form. “It does not appear that he’ll require much sustenance. Why is he – ”

Before he could finish his sentence the Dragonborn temple guardian burst into the room where the adventurers stood. “Murderers! Treachery from the overworlders!”

Surina was too agitated to listen when Kerac protested that they had hardly just raised Chrrak from the dead only to kill him again. Regan blocked the guard’s path to Po, drawing her sword while maintaining a defensive posture. “The still center is the path to perfection for a warrior,” the avenger said to the Dragonborn. “Hasty judgments and emotional turmoil don’t serve you, you serve them.”

Klavicus steepled his fingers. “You know, that sounds vaguely pompous coming from a near-child.”

“What older, wiser warrior will say it in these times?” The druid raised a critical eyebrow at the daimon. “And yet it is refreshing to hear.”

“I suppose,” he shrugged. “But it doesn’t seem to have had much impact on the Dragonborn.” Surina was staring at Regan with a curious mix of hatred, suspicion and wondering in her eyes. “Perhaps the child needs to grow to fit into that Radiant Temple garb she so arrogantly donned.”

Desverendi sighed; some days Klavicus was more surly than others. “And who in these times would teach her what it means to wear it? She studies the tome diligently – I would think that would please you, Preserver.”

Klavicus grunted but was otherwise silent; today and in this mood the druid counted it a small blessing. Sugar Primrose, Saphira and Zane were conferring quietly and urgently among themselves while casting sidelong glances at Surina. Reaching a conclusion, Zane murmured to Kerac to keep the guard occupied and dashed away in search of Phaledra. “There’s something wrong with your guard. She is certainly not entirely herself. She appears to be – possibly – possessed.”

Phaledra’s brow creased in worry. “For some time now she has seemed odd – ” Kerac and Saphira were losing the battle of keeping the Dragonborn calm, and glancing over at the brewing conflict the priestess seized Zane’s arm. “Please, I would prefer there be no bloodshed in my temple.”

Regan had begun executing stances from her book. “Focus, Surina. Do them with me.”

Again the woman seemed torn between compliance and assault. “Or the imp  whispering in the Dragonborn’s ear might have something to do with her confused resistance,” Klavicus remarked.

Desverendi peered at the image before them. “I do not see an – ”

“Imp!” Sugar Primrose hissed. “There, on her shoulder.”  As she spoke the avenger stumbled and swore. “Now it’s on Regan’s neck – ”

The young druid immediately unleashed an attack, but Zane hesitated a moment. “Phaledra did say – ”

“I don’t think ‘no bloodshed’ included devils,” Regan snapped. “Kill it, please, it’s trying to poison me.”

The imp was quickly subdued and Kerac looked down where it lay unconscious and now visible on the ground. “It’s not quite dead,” he grinned. “We could send it to Klavicus as a present.”

Klavicus frowned as Po, shaking his head, drove his sword through the devil. “I feel nothing,” he muttered. “The sight of that creature should have enraged me, but I feel – nothing.”

The druid cast a concerned glance at the daimon. The Galeb Duhr and the Avangion had given him certain warnings, but such a mild manifestation of their fears was surely nothing to worry about. Yet.

Surina stared down at the corpse in dismay. “Two years. Two years and I never knew…It whispered the most horrible things, I was the agent of so much dissension, even to death – ”

“You had no way of knowing. And it’s over.” Regan reached into her pack and withdrew the book of kata. “Why don’t you borrow this? Study it. It might help.”

The Dragonborn was still hesitant, but her indecision now seemed born of personal shame rather than the raspings of a malign influence. Finally she reached out her hand and took the book. “Thank you,” she said softly, backing away. “I need to – think – ” And then she was gone.

Zane pulled out the map from the mysterious defector and his ‘evil organization.’ “Shall we go check out the cunning trap?”

When they arrived at the prescribed location, a day earlier than the prescribed time, they could all agree on three things. The first two were that it was a trap and that it was, the obviousness of the note aside, very cunning.

The room was large and dark, ringed almost in its entirety by a ten foot ledge, with three pillars and three boulders dotting its lower surface. A massive metal figure stood motionless behind the nearest boulder. Sugar Primrose studied the configuration carefully. “If that – thing – activated,” she whispered, making a sweeping gesture with her hand from the creature to the door, “it could push that boulder against the opening.”

“Sealing us in,” Saphira said grimly.

“What is it?” Po asked.

“A bronze warder,” Zane replied. “An arcane construct. Someone, somewhere, is wearing a controlling amulet. They give instructions, the warder carries them out.”

“Over what distance?” Kerac asked. Zane shrugged in reply.

“I don’t like it,” Regan said, and this was the third thing they agreed on. Seeing no compelling reason to walk into an ambush and with a final sour glance at the bronze warder, they retraced their steps to the Seven Pillared Hall, having decided that tracking down and confronting the author of the note would be a more fruitful activity than getting trapped in a remote cave and eventually dying of starvation, if they were lucky enough to defeat the warder and whatever else awaited them hidden on the shadowy ledges.

They began their efforts at handwriting identification in the friendliest territories they could find, asking first Phaledra, then Rendil Halfmoon and his aunt. Finding no answers there they moved onto Gendar and, with considerably more reluctance, the mage Orontor. He too said he was unfamiliar with the handwriting on the note. But unlike the others he was plainly lying.

He brushed aside their accusations. “I’ll pay you – an item of magic equal in value to the one I’ve already promised for news of Paldemar – if you return and engage whoever is waiting there.”

Regan waved the note at him. “I’d rather know who wrote this.”

“I might tell you,” he said coolly. “Afterward. Might,” he emphasized.

The avenger snarled in frustration as the others took up arguing or wheedling as suited their personalities. Klavicus smiled slightly as he watched. “I had almost forgotten how insufferably smug old-world mages were. You’re just wasting your breath,” he informed the figures in the vision. “He won’t budge. He doesn’t need to.”

“Your magic item won’t do us much good if we die trying to claw our way past a boulder,” Saphira observed.

“I have a warder of my own. I would come after a suitable time and release you if you were trapped.”

“I still think it would be prudent to find our own tools,” Regan muttered to Zane, eyeing Orontor with suspicion.

The psion nodded vigorously. “Agreed.”

And so with pickaxes and other rock-shifting equipment in hand they returned to whatever lay in wait. Saphira scrambled up one of the ledges with a rope and the others followed as quietly as they could. Rope tied around her waist, the bard inched her way toward the bronze warder, constantly on the alert for traps while Sugar Primrose fixed her gaze on the behemoth, ready to block the entrance with a thick wall of brambles should the creature move toward the awkwardly balanced boulder.

Saphira’s luck did not hold long. She identified a suspicious rock face and the trip wire that held it back, but her fingers slipped trying to disable it and only Po tugging hard on the rope kept her from falling at the feet of the warder. The noise drew the attention of two tiefling who had been lying in wait for them; the warder awakened, and battle was joined.

The bard was the unrelenting focus of their enemies’ attention; Po doggedly tried to force the bronze warder to engage with him but it invariably shrugged off the pain he inflicted for ignoring him and returned its attention to Saphira. The conflict was frustrating, and long: any time Po or Regan struck the tiefling their enemies disappeared only to manifest an unpleasantly far distance away. After Zane suggested putting as much distance between themselves and the warder as possible until the tiefling were dealt with, dazing it long enough to give everyone time to reposition, Sugar Primrose and Saphira devoted much of their time and energy to knocking it off of ledges it had just climbed or pushing it away.

Slowly, inexorably it closed the gap, crushing several of the adventurers underfoot and swiping through others with a giant axe, but by then the tiefling were dead and, though bloody and bruised, Skarp’s youths prevailed. On the corpse of one of the tiefling they found two notes and a map depicting a cleverly hidden passage to a place called the Well of Demons.

The first note read:

To Maldrick Scarmaker, Exalted Chieftain of the Blackfangs and Chosen of Yeenoghu: Paldemar offers you the corpses of these champions as a gift of ongoing friendship, that our arrangement might continue to be mutually beneficial. May you savor their blood.

Your friend and ally, Paldemar

And the second:

I don’t care how you do it, but deal with these adventurers. Take one of the bronze warders if you must. If they remain in the Labyrinth, they could disrupt my plans. Once you’ve dealt with them, deliver their bodies to our gnoll friends, along with the enclosed scroll.

Paldemar

The handwriting on the notes matched the one they had been given by the false Chrrak. “No need to ask Orontor about the handwriting,” Klavicus observed.

Desverendi was looking at the map. “Do you know this place?”

“As you might guess from the name, it’s not particularly amiable. If that’s where the gnolls have taken up residence, Skarp’s paladins will have an – interesting – time reclaiming the remaining Unspoken.”

When the youths appeared to be bedding down for a rest before returning to the Seven Pillared Hall, Klavicus jumped the view ahead until they were speaking with the mage Orontor. “Where did Paldemar get a hold of a bronze warder?” Regan was asking.

The mage spread his hands before him. “I don’t know. And I’d like to. It isn’t one of ours.”

“How hard are the components to come by?” Zane asked.

“Trivial, for us. But I was sure he lacked the skill to complete one.”

“What did they want with the slaves? How long will we have to retrieve them?”

Orontor looked grim. “Blood sacrifice, I expect. They’ll make them last as long as possible. For what that’s worth.”

“They’re trying to summon Yeenoghu,” Klavicus spat. “Fools. Ah well, what would glorified bipedal hyenas understand of natural law?”

Desverendi’s lip curled in disgust. “The appetites of demons.”

Klavicus leaned back lazily. “Blood has a repulsive odor. For myself, I would have demanded sacrifices of white truffles and saffron, caviar and civet coffee and tigerfish. Incur the same amount of violence as worshippers fought to obtain the rarities and I could eat well.”

But there was a brittleness to his tone; the druid cast a sideways glance but bit back a reproach as the image jumped to Terrlen Darkseeker, looking relieved when the young people said they were leaving him behind for his own safety. “The danger doesn’t deter me,” he said and seemed to mean it, “but – ” he looked down at his hands sadly, as if he could see the werewolf paws, “I think I need some time to understand what I am, what I – ”

The flames leapt skyward for a moment and now Desverendi eyed the daimon sharply, but Klavicus had veiled his face in shadow and would not meet his gaze. Saphira was making a careful pass across the entrance of a large room, tall pillars carved with minotaur faces and a dark well in the corner which for now she gave a wide berth. Every so often she would jump, staring intently at a pillar.

“What is the matter?” Desverendi asked.

“With the bard? I imagine she feels as if the minotaurs are watching her.” The view shifted to Po and Zane on the other side of the hallway, poking with some desperation through piles of rubble, testing the strength of some short lengths of iron bar. “With the paladin and the psion? I imagine they’re looking for something to hold up the ceiling.” Another shift, to Kerac, Regan and Sugar Primrose holding unnaturally still, their faces tense. “With the rest? I expect they’ve realized from the scuff marks and powdery rubble that the roof over their heads drops to the floor in response to some as yet unascertained trigger. Oh look,” he said as Po shifted some trash in a dark corner and both paladin and psion retreated in haste with a hand covering nose and mouth, “gnoll crepes.”

“This is terrible,” the old druid said.

Klavicus shrugged. “Not if they have the sense to retreat.”

“Knowing that tormented captives lie beyond? They will not.”

“Ah yes, the Galeb Duhr’s oath. Assistance to those in need, even unto death. He always struck me as more practical than that. Give them a single purpose and send them on their way, not some vague admonition to make the world a better place.” At the last two words his voice took on a mincing falsetto. “Perhaps Oathbinder warped his mind,” he concluded with a growl.

Desverendi sighed quietly. Definitely a surly day. He watched without comment as Po and Zane returned to the hallway and, after a short conference, all of the youths sprinted to join Saphira in the room. Klavicus shook his head. “What will happen?” the druid asked.

“That depends on – ” he frowned as Saphira’s continuing investigations took her near the well. “A bad idea, youngling.” Even as he spoke the words a shadowy claw crawled out of the water and the false ceilings at each of the three exits slammed down, shutting them in. The claw turned to dark mist and dissipated, and the daimon rested his forehead in his hand.

“What has happened?” Desverendi asked.

“They’re trapped.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a trial. Defeat the creatures summoned by a demon from the well and the passage ceilings will rise again. Be killed by the creatures summoned by a demon from the well and the ceilings will rise again.”

“But…” The druid felt a desperate desire not to complete the unpleasant thought that was forming in his head.

Klavicus, unrelenting, finished it for him. “Yes – where is the demon going to come from? I think we both know the answer to that question. So when will the ceilings rise again? Never. The tools they brought with them won’t penetrate that much rock. No, I think this is the end of the Galeb Duhr’s champions. Killed not by the forces of the Dragon, but by the mere absence of the very thing they’ve been unwittingly tasked to restore.”

Desverendi turned his face aside; he had no desire to watch their disbelief and confusion and dismay. And so he did not see the flare of red in Sugar Primrose’s pupils or the almost inhuman contortions of her face. But he did hear the strange syllables that tore themselves from her mouth.

“Erek nogg kas umbras

Erek nogg kas dolor
Erek nogg kas rabikas

Sukak rashka liberca

Eck vas!”

Klavicus’ eyes burned with a terrible intensity that the druid knew bode ill for interruption, but he had to know. “What has happened?”

The daimon replied in clipped syllables, “She has demanded that they come.” In a similar meter but in Common he chanted softly.

“Come to me in darkness
Come to me in pain
Come to me in fury

Smash down the gate

To me!”

“Surely that will not – ” But before Desverendi could finish the thought he saw Kerac stiffen and clutch at the fragment of the World Seed.

And now from somewhere deep within the well a voice replied. Klavicus grew tense, and the old druid scanned his immediate vicinity in confusion. “Do you feel – ”

The daimon nodded. “She demanded that a demon respond. Somehow the priest’s piece of the Seed bored a conduit for a reply. The tiniest of rents in the veil that separates Oerth from the multiverse and yet…it is there.” He cocked his head as if listening to a distant sound. “And it is not repairing.”

Desverendi’s eyes narrowed. “My protégé summoned a demon.” Klavicus returned his gaze but said nothing. “In Abyssal. A language she does not speak. Or did not speak, until you…” He trailed off, continuing to glare at Klavicus. If his intent was to make the daimon repentant, it failed. “You can at least translate the reply.”

With a faint smile on his face the daimon chanted.

“From darkness, we answer
Bearing pain, we answer
With fury, we answer

We sunder the gate

Let the old world return

And the ancient trials begin again.”

The minotaur columns were calling as the daimon spoke. “Mask, bell, blade, tome.” Creatures spit forth from the well like gristle from a disdaining mouth: two cavern chokers and a tentacled phalagar native to the caverns, and a ghoul that Desverendi supposed had been a hapless challenger in a former life. If so, he felt little sympathy for the creature.

Haphazard a selection of opponents as they had seemed at first glance, as battle was joined Desverendi had to admit that they were distressingly effective in concert. To close with the phalagar was to be entwined in its deadly tentacles, an aim the cavern chokers aided by seizing victims in their unnaturally long arms and dragging them to the creature while the ghoul played its part by spewing a noxious atmosphere that left its target bent over and retching in place.

The phalagar itself burrowed about the room with ease, appearing wherever it liked and dragging hapless individuals wither it would. It did not take long for Zane and Sugar Primrose to realize that “wither it would” was likely to be the well. Not wanting to see their companions drowned and resurrected as ghouls in turn they took appropriate action, Zane manipulating psionic emanations in a field around him that confounded any efforts to displace a person by force while Sugar Primrose twined a hasty cover of brambles over the well’s opening. The phalagar could throw someone into the thorns if it wished, but they could not sink into the black depths.

Fierce as the struggle was, Klavicus was paying scant attention. His smile had grown simultaneously twisted and almost dreamy, his attention was focused unnervingly on Sugar Primrose and he murmured, “Is this what it’s like, having offspring?”

In spite of himself, in spite of the Galeb Duhr and the Avangion’s warnings, the druid clenched his stony hand into a fist as irritation seethed within him. “She is a child of nature. You will not turn her into a demon.”

“But isn’t that the delight of children? You can’t turn them into anything. It would be folly to think otherwise. They become what they would, what destiny makes of them.” Attentive to Desverendi again he waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I wasn’t seeking a legacy. I didn’t do anything on purpose. ”

“I do not think I find that comforting. We are playing with dangerous forces.”

Klavicus scowled. “I’ve been telling you all that. But now we are playing, and it is too late to withdraw from the game.” He stared down at his hands with much the same expression as Terrlen Darkseeker. “Too late.”

Desverendi watched as a cavern choker snatched Kerac and pulled him across the ceiling. “What will happen to the priest if the severance is undone?”

“Ask the Avangion,” Klavicus replied acridly. “No doubt he’s thought the matter through.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I have no answers, only hypotheses.” He began ticking possibilities off on his fingers. “Will he take up a normal life with the vaguely disappointed feeling that his best and most important years are behind him? Become a guardian of the broken tower made whole once again? The stone grows heavier, he feels more immovable, with every click of a piece fitting into place. Perhaps he’ll become the tower itself? Who can say?”

“This is a young life we’re talking about,” Desverendi’s gravel voice was stern.

“Yes it is. See? I’m thinking like an Avangion already.”

“Heartlessness is nothing particularly new to you,” the druid grumbled.

“Ah,” Klavicus smiled impishly, “but this is heartlessness with purpose.”

The phalagar, last of the challengers, fell. Two of the three fallen blocks snapped back into the ceiling of their own accord. The way they had come remained shut. “Why only two?” Desverendi asked.

The daimon rose and stretched. “I expect there are more trials to endure before they’ll be permitted to depart. The gnolls aren’t their only adversaries now.” With a crackle and hiss the fire extinguished. “But not tonight. I’m tired. I think I’ll take a walk in the desert before turning in to dream.” He said the last disdainfully.

“Do not go far, Ancient One. The night wind has an ill feel.”

“Doesn’t it always?” The golden-tinged eyes that met the druid’s were angry. “I still have some measure of my power. What did not drain away vis major into your pupil.” Knowing that Klavicus was baiting him, Desverendi said nothing. “Besides, will the lizards and the cockroaches not rise up to defend me in my hour of need?”

The elemental watched with a measure of concern as the daimon stalked into the desert and though he briefly considered sending one of his creatures after him to keep watch, he did not.

* * *

Klavicus did feel tired, more tired than he could remember ever feeling over the millennia of his long life, but it was a fatigue of the spirit, not of the body. Softly he spoke the words that had gushed half-unwilling from Sugar Primrose. “Erek nogg kas umbras. Erek nogg kas dolor. Erek nogg kas rabikas. Sukak rashka liberca. Eck vas!” What would happen now, now that he had taken a step on the path of transformation, if he chanted the summoning command, even if the multiverse were restored? He did not want to know. But he did know, in a deep still center that he seldom allowed voice, the seed of otherness within him that was other no longer, the cancer that he had permitted to sprout, that he himself had planted, dreams the blossoms that haunted the new sleep. He sighed heavily, fragments of a millenia-old poem drifting across his mind. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”

He stared up at the twin moons, Tenser’s last, desperate effort to save himself. Klavicus and the archmage had always despised each other, even at the end of Tenser’s days when the balor was certainly no enemy and hadn’t been for time out of mortal mind. Would he still be here if he hadn’t been so reckless at that end, so intent on creating the seed of the Avangion that he ignored the discovery and destruction of his every clone, so intent on planting that seed in a place and time out of the Dragon’s reach that he strode with open eyes into a hopeless battle?

In his final moments, too late, did the old archmage regret sacrificing himself in the name of an uncertain future? What darkness, what pain, drove him to such a final, irrevocable change? “Erek nogg kas umbras. Erek nogg kas dolor.” Klavicus turned his eyes from the moons, turned his face back toward the Vale. What drove him? What drives anyone? “Eck vas!” No, never again. Too late. The closed buds of a nearby cactus burst into full bloom at his presence, a dozen many-petaled flowers glowing incandescent in the moonlight. He bent down and carefully extracted the entire plant to take back as a peace offering to Desverendi, although he suspected he could merely rip it from the ground and still it would flourish in his hands. I do not think that they will sing to me.

He couldn’t have left if he wanted to, as there was no discernible exit. The altars seemed fixated on the young people, and only with great difficulty could he wrench their vision away. Think of Greyhawk, see nothing. Furyondy, Irongate, Veluna, the Adri, all the same. He could get a view of Spinecastle, but it appeared to be deserted. That made him uneasy. Obviously some time had passed, and strong as Clement Vir had been he was still mortal, and heredity offered no guarantees. The Vir line might have failed in whatever cataclysm surrounded a second corruption of the World Seed, or perhaps even before. Still, it seemed a bad omen, and he shivered.

Never a great reader at the best of times, he found Klavicus’ new taste in literature too peculiar for words. He seemed obsessed with tales of a fantasy world where the sun was failing and magicians who withered the ground under their feet stalked a desiccated land. Halflings and elves were feral creatures, and the only hope of salvation from some creature calling himself The Dragon lay in the machinations of a light-infused being known as the Avangion who had left his corporeality behind in a misty past. Fiction, he insisted to himself, with increasing stridency and desperation as book after book repeated some variation of the same story. It can’t be true. It can’t be.

He drank himself into a stupor that night, and by the time he woke early the next afternoon his anxiety had receded to manageable dimensions. He was a bard, after all. He knew a fantastical, implausible tale when he saw one, and so with some measure of equanimity he set about the difficult task of preparing breakfast with a raging hangover, promising himself that the eating of it would be worth all of the pain. Water pouring into a glass was like a waterfall next to his ear. Spreading butter across toast was an avalanche on a mountainside. And the eggs…since when had cracking an egg been accompanied by a noisy burst of bright light?

A woman stepped out of the portal that had materialized mere feet away from him. She was slender to the point of gauntness, her hair was short and raggedly cut, and the gaze that fixed on him was uncomfortably similar to a hunter looking at dinner.

“Who are you?” They spoke simultaneously.

“Well as you are the new arrival,” Hanen had forgotten many things, but how to bluff was not among them. “I think first identification belongs to you.”

The woman was unimpressed. “I know whose home this is, and as it isn’t yours, interloper, I believe you should speak first.” She emphasized her belief with a dagger formerly hidden up her sleeve.

Hanen feigned – and it was feigned, the dagger looked sharp – indifference. “My name would mean nothing to you, and yours no doubt nothing to me, so that leaves us at a bit of a standoff, doesn’t it?”

“Not really,” she replied, unsmiling. “I’m armed, and you’re not. Where is the daimon?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t seen him since I – arrived.” He knew he sounded petulant but he was yet to become accustomed to the unnatural manner of his arrival, and felt peevish every time he was forced to think about it.

“How did you get in then?”

“A man named – hey, I’m not sure I should be telling you this.”

She waved the dagger under his nose. “Consider your options.”

Hanen considered them. What allegiance did he owe any of these people anyway? The man who had superintended his recovery from resurrection had been a name, a face, a non-fount of non-information. As for Klavicus, if the peculiarity of the surroundings didn’t bear the old balor’s indelible stamp Hanen might begin to believe that what he’d witnessed at the altars was a vision of events long in the past. Besides, he’d always done better with women. “He called himself Opa Skarp.”

She studied him for a moment, then the dagger disappeared back up her sleeve. “That name is known to us.” She held out her hand. “I am Mahlanda.”

He bent down with a flourish and kissed it while she watched him with hard, suspicious eyes. This one was going to be a tough nut to crack. “Hanen. Bard, by trade.”

“I know a bard.” She withdrew her hand and narrowed her eyes. “Compared to her, you seem…soft.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” he barely suppressed a frown.

“Why are you here?” She helped herself to a piece of his toast. “Are you a new acolyte of the Great One?”

He pulled the plate out of her reach. “A what of the who?”

“I thought you said you knew the daimon.”

“I do, but – ” then he remembered those insect things, what had Skarp called them – thri-kreen? – approaching the unconscious balor on his litter and naming him by that title. “Good gods, the old demon has disciples?”

“The daimon,” she corrected his pronunciation the same way Skarp had done, “has great labors ahead of him. We should be honored to wash his feet if that is what he requires of us.” Her contemptuous glance suggested she didn’t believe Hanen capable of much more.

“It’ll be a cold day in the Nine Hells before I wash that codger’s feet,” Hanen muttered.

The remains of her toast fell to the counter and the dagger reappeared in her hand. “I do not understand all the words you use,” she said with ice in her voice, “but I can sense their meaning. If you require a lesson in respect for the daimon I will be happy to provide it.”

Suddenly Hanen had enough. Slapping his hands on the stone counter with sufficient force to cause all of his cooking utensils to jump he snapped, “Look here lady, I was summoned unasked from my rest – of the eternal variety, if you know what I mean – by persons unknown for an unknown purpose. As if to put me at my ease, they assured me they knew my old friend Klavicus – who I conveniently have not seen in the flesh to verify their tale since being stuffed back into mine. I’ve been threatened, insulted, and abandoned in a place with crappy food where apparently you have to know the secret handshake to come and go as you please. Stab me if you like and explain why my corpse is decomposing in the kitchen to the demon – daimon – whatever the hell he is now, if he ever bothers to show up. Or leave me in peace to eat my breakfast. But more lessons in civility at knifepoint? I – am – not – in – the – mood.”

To his surprise, Mahlanda put the knife away and, for the first time since she’d arrived, actually laughed. “You certainly are irascible enough to be the daimon’s true friend. Eat your breakfast then. I came here to work.”

He kept half an eye on her while he finished cooking and she busied herself among Klavicus’ books. She handled them with a reverence and care that were certainly consistent with the balor’s own; it was easy to believe they might be acquainted. And she was the first person he’d seen in, well, person, since Skarp left. Sighing, he divided his meal in two and set a plate beside her. She smiled, thanked him politely, and returned to her reading as she ate.

Hanen retreated to the altars with his food, feeling some lingering pique over the woman calling him “soft.” As if in response an image of Saphira appeared, standing with several of her companions before a massive door in the interminable desert – it’s fiction, it’s fiction, Hanen insisted to himself – as Po and Sugar Primrose approached from overland. He swung the view backward in time, retracing the pair’s steps to an inn he didn’t recognize in a city that was alien to him; in a room in the inn the two were talking to the very woman he had met this morning.

“You have a great facility with the altars.” Hanen jumped; he hadn’t heard Mahlanda come up behind him. “I find them very difficult to control.”

Now that he had the upper hand on some tiny front, Hanen had no intention of admitting that he found this particular set very difficult to control as well. “I learned the art from Klavicus. Not with these, but some similar.”

The view turned away from the inn and back to the doors in the desert before he could hear what Mahlanda had said to them. ”I do know that privacy always wins,” she smiled as she sat down beside him. “For everyone save Klavicus himself. It has been some time since I’ve looked in on the young people. How do they fare?”

Sugar Primrose, to Hanen’s eye, was faring somewhat ill at the moment. As Saphira settled into what appeared to be a lengthy ritual to open the intricately carved entry the initially placid druid began to pace, slowly and then with increasing agitation, alternately muttering to herself and clapping a hand over her own mouth in wide-eyed confusion. Finally losing whatever internal battle she fought, her eyes glowed red and she shouted words in a guttural tongue that seemed to leave Mahlanda bewildered but were familiar enough to Hanen. Saphira and the others stared at the druid as the doors slammed open. “Words of command, no doubt,” Mahlanda suggested.

Hanen failed to suppress a snicker. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Then you understand her?” Her tone was haughty.

“Loosely translated?” the bard replied. “It approximates to something like ‘Open the fucking door!’”

She frowned. “If you don’t know, have the decency to admit it.” Hanen rolled his eyes but refused to rise to the bait. “Where are they going?” she asked as they walked down a long, high hallway lined with massive statues of demons. “And why?”

“They’re looking to reclaim the kidnapped companions of a group of wandering nomads. I suppose,” he added bitterly, “it goes without saying that the nomads wander the arid wastes. As for where they’ve gone looking, into the Underdark.”

She looked at him blankly. “The what?”

Hanen sighed. Didn’t these people know anything? “I could explain, but no doubt you’d treat the explanation with all the respect you did my comprehension of demonic. So perhaps we should just watch? You’ll see soon enough.”

Mahlanda gasped as they entered the Seven Pillared Hall. “So much water!”

Hanen said nothing and carefully avoided looking at her; the exclamation pushed him too near a precipice with edges all too slippery with the pages of Klavicus’ library. It’s fiction. It has to be. To distract himself he focused on less dangerous matters: explaining drow and hobgoblins and duergar, dancing away from the subject of why the Underdark halflings weren’t vicious, feral creatures. Fiction. Instead he treated her to a detailed explanation of what he’d already gleaned regarding the politics and theology of the Seven Pillared Hall and its vicinity. Mahlanda eyed him shrewdly whenever he steered an unpleasant topic in a different direction, but never tried to steer it back.

They watched largely in silence as the young people swept through the Blood Reaver stronghold in search of slaves. The sweeping had perhaps been accidental – Saphira and Reign’s stealthy explorations were brought to an abrupt end when they came face to face with a pair of duergar chatting over a fire and not at all pleased to see them. The bard prudently retreated but Reign found herself quickly surrounded; the thorny wall thrown down by Sugar Primrose to protect the warrior also left her isolated from her companions, who themselves struggled with several waves of thugs alerted by the duergars’ roars of indignation. In the end they dispatched enough enemies to cow the remaining few into surrendering, learning from them that the captive Unspoken had already been taken by the duergar and were most likely in the Horned Hold.

The second time they set out from the Seven Pillared Hall they took guide Terrlen Darkseeker with them, as the road to the Horned Hold wasn’t easy to find. Mahlanda leaned forward intently as five individuals, four heavily armed and a short, stocky fifth wearing a tinfoil crown, approached them on the path. “Humans, dwarves – why didn’t we know about this place?”

Hanen let the rhetorical question pass as the dwarf, called Thane, demanded the obeisance due his kingly state. The young people stared at him in disbelief as his claims and demands escalated in fantasticality and belligerence; Po pressed him with some hostility until Saphira hushed him. “The ‘king’ is a joke,” Hanen observed, “but his guards aren’t. Why don’t they just toss him a few coin and be on their way?”

“Because coin is difficult to come by,” Mahlanda replied sternly.

“So is blood,” the bard retorted.

In the end neither coin nor blood were parted with, as Regan with a sly smile offered Thane the newly emptied Blood Reaver stronghold with their humble compliments to serve as his palace. “Overland that would be as good as a death sentence,” Mahlanda remarked. “Such a defensible location would not go unoccupied for long, and four mercenaries seem insufficient to its retention.”

“Oh, the Underdark is no different,” Hanen assured her. “Clever and ruthless, these ‘children’ of Opa Skarp’s.”

“I have found them quite tempered and fair in their responses to date,” Mahlanda said. “At first I thought their trust and kindness a great weakness, but it seems to have served them thus far.”

Hanen started to laugh, but the woman didn’t look as if she were joking. He did begin to harbor the suspicion that if these youths represented the pinnacle of restraint in this strange new world, he was just as glad he didn’t know the way out of Klavicus’ abode.

The youths’ progress to the Horned Hold was interrupted again, more violently this time, by massive half-lizard, half-insectoid creatures who burst from the floor and walls around them. Mahlanda looked concerned, but not surprised, and now it was Hanen’s turn to seek enlightenment. “They’re called kruthik,” she replied. “They live in groups overseen by a hive lord,” of the seven assaulting hive mates, she pointed out one brute larger than its fellows. “Nasty creatures. I don’t envy them the struggle.”

And indeed they were hard-pressed initially, as the creatures attacked with pincers and claws and caustic spit. They did their best to protect their guide, but in spite of their caution Darkseeker was caught in several acid bursts, and Mahlanda was no less surprised than the young people when with a feral cry he fell writhing to the ground only to stand again moments later hideously transformed. “What is that?” Mahlanda cried.

“Lupine muzzle, furred arms, yellow eyes staring wildly – looks like Darkseeker is a werewolf. Not very well in control of his affliction, either,” Hanen remarked, as the half-man looked poised to attack ally or enemy without discrimination.

By the time Hanen managed to finish an unsatisfactory description of werewolves to Mahlanda – her ignorance of wolves was a significant impediment – the fight was over. Kerac had calmed Darkseeker, who now sat disconsolately on a pile of rubble. “Caravans I’ve guided have been attacked before,” he muttered with his head in his hands. “Between the Blood Reavers and local predators, it’s inevitable. And I never understood why – why there were always one or two victims – injured – mauled – in ways inconsistent with the rest of the attack. I guess I know now.” He stared bewildered at his hands then set his shoulders and looked at the young people surrounding him. “You’ll be wanting your money back,” he said. “And to be finding a different guide.”

Zane and Regan shook their heads emphatically. “We don’t want another guide,” Kerac said.

Darkseeker looked chastened, but relieved. “That seems dangerous,” Hanen said as they prepared to rest and nurse their wounds in the kruthik nest. “Both retaining the were and bedding down in the midst of their enemies’ corpses.” Zane and Sugar Primrose were carefully stripping the carapaces from the bodies, setting them in a pile to take to the gnome Wrong for his damaged flying machine.

“Kruthik have an instinctive aversion to the blood of their fellows,” Mahlanda said. “In truth it’s probably the safest place they could find. As for their guide – it is, I believe, part of their code to accept him.” In a near sing-song she added, “Will you swear to protect and aid those in need of assistance, through inconvenience, through discomfort and pain, even unto death, with every resource you call your own? He certainly strikes me as a man in need of assistance.”

“That sounds like part of a paladin’s oath,” Hanen observed.

“Yes.” A shadow of unhappiness crossed her face; the bard wondered why. “Rather a remarkable thing, going from no paladins in the world to seven all at once. I attended the oathswearing with the daimon.” She added softly, “It was the first time I met him.”

“No – no paladins?” he stuttered. He waved her to silence as she looked poised to explain. Fiction. Fiction.

He focused his attention on the images before them to keep the woman from talking. Po was just pulling an ancient ring from the kruthik nest and setting it on his finger. When he staggered backward for a moment, wide-eyed, Hanen swiftly activated the air altar and uttered a few words in demonic. Overlaying Po, who had grown insubstantial to their eyes, was a man in ornate armor standing before a keep on whose walls massive ogres brandished weapons and shouted epithets as a red dragon flew overhead.

A soft exclamation escaped Mahlanda’s lips. “I didn’t know the altars could look into someone’s mind.”

“They can’t,” he said. “I tapped into the vision the ring is projecting.”

“Still,” she looked at him with new respect, “impressive.”

The man in the ornate armor drew a sword of unusual design, looking as if it had been forged of links of metal beaten flat. “Chainbreaker,” Hanen and Mahlanda murmured together.

Hanen felt a moment’s relief. If she was familiar with the weapon, then surely not that much time had passed. Still, ignoring his better judgment he asked, “Where have you seen it before?”

“I had a vision, of it and other weapons of ancient renown, at their last wieldings before they were lost forever. Chainbreaker.” She lost herself in thought for a moment. “Oathbinder. Starfire. Torment.” Hanen felt his face grow hot. Ancient. Lost. I knew I shouldn’t have asked. “And you?” she said.

“I met Xaod once. The man who forged it.” He cursed the quality of his peripheral vision; he’d rather not know that she was looking at him in confusion and not a little fear. “Well, we don’t need to watch them sleeping,” he said brusquely.

He jumped the vision forward to an image of Darkseeker skirting the edge of a deep ravine and leading the young paladins to an inconspicuous entrance to the Horned Hold, one showing signs of recent and hasty construction. Saphira’s efforts to charm their way inside met with no success. “I could have told her that,” Hanen mumbled. “Orcs have no love of humans, and the duergar are even worse.”

Po suggested finding another entrance, but their scouting sorties revealed nothing that wasn’t still more formidable to breach, and in the end they decided to smash down the gate and try to take the orcs before they could escape to give warning. With luck the sound of a nearby forge would cover the forced entrance.

And there began a pattern that would carry them safely if not always easily through room after room of the hold: creep softly to an entrance and identify all exits, leap in unannounced and block those exits, slaughter every occupant to a man. It was a calculated brutality but Hanen had to admit it was efficient. Only a smith at the forge nearly managed to escape and raise the alarm, but a burst of psionic energy from Zane knocked him dying to the ground only yards from a door behind which help lay.

Though not the slaves they sought they found three humans toiling in the kitchens who were brave enough to set a diversionary fire before fleeing to the forge and barring the doors behind them. This set into motion another ugly battle in the mess hall, after which everyone was obviously fatigued. Po and Regan leaned on their swords while the others slumped against the walls. “Shouldn’t stay, shouldn’t go on,” Regan said. “So what do we do?”

Opinion was divided but in the end they pressed forward and found the captive Unspoken, chained in pits and guarded by devils who hovered out of reach in the high-ceilinged room and pelted the party with spells. Prevailing once again and escorting the slaves to temporary safety they paused once more to consider their options.

“Only one occupied room remains,” Saphira reported after scouting. Hanen had watched the young bard’s progress with some professional curiosity and, perhaps, a twinge of professional jealousy for the unusual harp string she bore. She seemed to enjoy an almost symbiotic relationship with it, permitting it to twine around her wrists or down her throat with its own motive power and becoming ruthless assassin or cunning thief in turn as her need and desire demanded.

“Going on without rest is folly,” Zane observed.

“I think they’ll notice that we’ve slaughtered all of their compatriots,” Regan said. “We have what we came for. We could just leave.” She sounded neither committed nor opposed to the idea, only tired.

Hollow-cheeked and weary they stared at one another, argued quietly back and forth and, finally, took up their swords and spells for one last assault to clear the hold of slaver filth. It was a grueling fight. More than once one or the other would teeter on the edge of unconsciousness or death only to be doggedly revived by a comrade to fight on. “Their endurance is worth remark,” Hanen said.

“That is why the hopes of the world rest on their shoulders,” Mahlanda replied.

Fiction. Fiction, the tiny voice in Hanen’s mind trilled again. Don’t want to know.

Finally the hold fell silent, awash in the blood of the duergar and their minions. Ten of the twelve Unspoken had been recovered; two, the newly freed slaves said, had been taken by gnolls to an unknown destination and fate. “We can’t go after them today,” Regan said. “Let’s take the captives back to the Hall.”

“We can’t go back the way we came,” Kerac reminded them. And indeed just before they’d tucked Darkseeker into a shallow cave to wait for their return or to make his way back alone when three days had passed they had narrowly escaped an encounter with an ettercap, a drake and assorted bugbears – all bearing the insignia of a red eye – who had found themselves a shadowed nook from which to prey on innocent passersby.

Sitting and binding her wounds, Regan gave Darkseeker a meaningful glance. “I’ll find another way,” he assured them.

The return journey to the Seven Pillared Hall was made without incident, and the ancient kobold Chrrak – once again Hanen paused to explain the concept of kobolds to Mahlanda – awaited them with a written message.

“Your actions against the duergar are commendable, Regan read aloud. “I am in a position of power in the evil organization behind the duergar’s actions, and I wish to help you defeat my comrades. I have been seeking a way out of the organization, and I believe you can help me. Follow the attached map so that we can meet in secret.”

Hanen was already frowning even as the young people burst out chattering.

“‘Evil organization?’ Who says things like that?”

“Someone trying to lead you into a trap?”

“Why would they give the message – and a map – to a beggar well-known for his dubious sanity?”

“Who in the Hall knows that Chrrak knows who we are?”

That brought conversation to a standstill. A brief investigation led them to what they feared to find: the last survivor of the kobold race’s corpse. Regan stared down at it, frowning. “We have to bring him back. Phaledra at the temple could do that.”

“Why, exactly?” Po put in.

“Because it’s our fault he’s dead,” Kerac said.

“And because – because he’s the last,” Regan added.

Mahlanda shook her head. “That way lies madness, child.”

Hanen gave her a sharp glance. “In my time we would have called it charity.”

“A practice to get you killed. Perhaps it is just as well the daimon has not yet divulged the means to leave.”

They bore the body to the priestess of Erathis, telling her both why they suspected he died and that there was a shapeshifting imposter on the loose. Phaledra looked grave at all of the news, but especially the latter.

The kobold, restored to life if not sanity, began babbling about hearing the “voice of the dragon.” When Regan’s efforts to discern what he meant only sent Chrrak into a raving fit Po joined the effort and drew his sword, which had shown healing properties in the past. Chrrak did stop raving, falling into a deep unconsciousness more restful than his manic state but from which Kerac was confident he would not awaken soon. Their investigations, for now, were concluded. But as they were turning away to other matters Po’s weapon rang like a gong and a pair of golden wings enfolded the ancient kobold. He turned the sword back toward Chrrak.

“The Avangion,” Mahlanda murmured, and for a moment Hanen thought she was going to fall on her knees before the altar. Regan and Po stood with lowered eyes. Fiction. Fiction.

A voice spoke.

Mistake this not for mercy
For I have seen his soul
and it is blackened.

It cares not for the small things of the world
Neither those above nor those below.
Only itself.

Take him to the haven
The daimon and the stone
Will hide and protect.

The Dragon’s mortality, a flawed diamond:
He the wedge
You the hammer.

When comes the time
Hesitate not, strike hard
Mistake this not for vengeance.”

Feeling sick, Hanen rose and stumbled backward. From the altar came the sound of running feet and the Dragonborn temple guardian Surina burst into the room. Her gaze took in the prone kobold and Po’s extended blade. “Murderers!” she cried, “Treachery from the overworlders!”

Exhausted from their labors, they sat at an edge of the Vale on the evening of the sixth day watching the sun sink below the horizon. Not all of the dust and sand had settled from the atmosphere, and the sky was streaked with fiery oranges and reds. “Will something like this happen every time a new piece of the Seed is mated?” Desverendi asked.

“Almost certainly. It has been separated for too long, and the corpus mundi has settled into a new kind of stasis in its absence.”

“The cure seems worse than the disease,” Desverendi observed.

“It might if we didn’t know the disease was fatal.”

“And if the cure proves equally so?”

Klavicus meticulously stacked dead wood onto a fire he was kindling. “The multiverse should be restored at the least. You and I could retreat to our home worlds.”

“And where would your home be?” Cracks suggestive of a smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. “It does not seem that the Abyss would welcome you any longer. Celestia, perhaps?”

“Very funny,” Klavicus grumbled, poking at the fire with a viciousness that toppled the recently added wood and forced him to start over. “If you want to know how the passel of paladins fared in the storm, I suggest you let me work in peace.”

For some time the only signs that the fire was relaying past events was a graininess in the flames. Then it settled in to a cloudy image of Kerac, Regan, Reign, Saphira and Zane struggling across the desert as a vicious wind whipped first sand and then rocks around them. Desverendi and Klavicus watched silently as the group grew increasingly uncertain of their direction and held their tongues even as Kerac, Saphira and Zane pitched into a hidden ravine.

Regan drew a rope from her pack and uttered a word of command as she tossed one end toward where she had last seen Zane, smiling with satisfaction as it slithered on farther than she could have thrown. Reign fastened the other end around her waist. The two women braced themselves against first one tug of weight and then a second, looking at one another in alarm when they failed to feel a third. Reign cocked her head in concentration then leaned in toward Regan, shouting to be heard above the storm, which was now picking up boulders and tossing them about like feathers. “Zane says they hear voices on the wind! But the storm is less violent in the ravine – we should come down.”

Regan winced as a rock slammed into the back of her knee, nearly buckling her. She looked ready to throw herself into the chasm if it offered relief from the wind. “Wait!” Reign shouted. She tied the rope around Regan as well. “Okay, at least we can control our descent.”

A larger rock struck Regan between her shoulder blades. With a look of disgust and despair she tugged at Reign’s knot and tossed the rope aside. “At a controlled rate,” she shouted, “the fall might kill me, but the storm certainly will!”

Reign shook her head as the avenger crouched at the side of the ravine and slid out of sight, gripped her tiger-etched blades and followed. She landed lightly on her feet beside Zane, who was just helping Regan up from the heap in which she’d fallen, and Saphira, who was helping Kerac test his ankle. Now Klavicus and Desverendi could hear the voices as well, singing with an eerie, unearthly quality. “Do you know what that is?” the daimon asked the druid.

Desverendi was listening with an expression of intense concentration, head tilted slightly sideways. “Perhaps…” to Klavicus’ irritation, he trailed off and said no more.

The youths were deciding whether to move toward the sound or away, whether the voices were leading them into a trap or shelter, whether they had caused the storm. “We can answer that question definitively at least,” Klavicus muttered.

Since forward lay commiseration or confrontation, either more satisfying than the impersonal, intangible hostility of the storm, they moved on with bowed heads and hunched shoulders, struggling virtually blind toward the source of the music. Suddenly its tone changed, grew more shrill, and Saphira held up a hand. “It’s a warning,” she said.

Before anyone could ask whether the warning was for them or of them, the air in their immediate vicinity cleared even though just behind the storm still raged. Not more than a few steps ahead lay a chasm, so deep they couldn’t see the bottom, and to the left a narrow bridge, the only way across. “Guess it was for us,” Kerac murmured.

They crossed the bridge and continued a short distance to a small camp. A seated woman, face drawn with fatigue and strain, held a piccolo-sized instrument to her lips that was the source of the unearthly music; Saphira realized now that the tones were somehow holding back the storm. “The Unspoken,” Desverendi said.

“The what?” Klavicus asked.

“A small, nomadic community of – I’m not sure what they’re identifying communal characteristic would be, other than their music. But I hesitate to call them musicians, as they are uninterested in performing for audiences.”

“I’ve never seen or heard of them.”

“I’m not surprised,” the druid replied. “They pursue no historical or intellectual endeavors. All save one of them – their designated intermediary with the larger world – never speak.”

“Vow of silence, eh?” Klavicus observed.

“Somewhat more drastic than that.” Desverendi concentrated, and the fire’s view swept across the playing woman and then her companions, all scattered about the camp fast asleep. Many of them bore scars of one kind or another on their necks. “Some are slaves who had their vocal cords cut to render them more useful to their masters. The rest voluntary silence themselves in a similarly permanent fashion when they join the community.”

The daimon shuddered. “That seems excessive.”

“It is their way,” the druid replied mildly.

Saphira had her harp in hand now and was trying to match the tones of the quickly tiring Unspoken. The woman smiled her encouragement, but an expression of frustration grew on the bard’s face as she realized that even playing with alternate tunings she would not be able to coax the harp to produce the desired sounds.

“What about that other string you have in your pack?” Kerac asked.

She looked at him blankly for a moment, then pulled it out and fitted it to the harp. The change was dramatic, and in short order Saphira had matched the Unspoken’s tune. For a few brief moments the field surged and strengthened, then collapsed back to its former strength as the piccolo player collapsed to the ground, passed out from exhaustion.

More hours passed and the storm did not abate, until Saphira looked as weary as her predecessor. Growing concerned, the others swept through the camp again, but not a single soul could be roused. Fortunately for all concerned, the bard and the winds reached the end of their strength together: Saphira and the shield collapsed, but a light breeze swept no more than the smallest grains of sand across the desert.

As the strangers returned to wakefulness the flute player hurried to a man and exchanged a series of signs. Nodding, he left her when she was finished and approached the youths, bowing deeply before Saphira. “Kife,” he said, “wielder of the quantum singularity, we are honored by your presence and grateful for your aid.”

“The…quantum singularity?” she replied. Smirking, Zane and Kerac nudged one another, murmuring sotto voce about Strings of Ultimate Power, but Saphira silenced them with a barbed look.

“The cosmic string,” he offered. Seeing no more comprehension on her face, he spread his hands in apology. “I am sorry, Kife. I have no more words to explain it.”

Desverendi looked more closely at the harp. “Do you know where that string came from?”

“Perhaps,” Klavicus snapped, a little petulantly. After a few moments he said, “Skarp’s brood was sucked into the sphere of influence of a devil some time ago. The string as well as the lenses for the glasses Kerac wears were in his possession.”

“The string and the Seed, the staff and the orb, the weapons wielded by the warriors…they have acquired so many powerful items in so short a time,” Desverendi murmured. “Truly the world has chosen its champions.”

“Or they have become the champions because they are particularly talented scavengers.” The daimon sounded irritable. “Really, Desverendi, you’re a druid, not a shaman.”

“The forces align,” the druid rumbled. “Look at you, what you have become. And had you been somewhere else when the storm descended…”

Klavicus rolled his eyes. “If I had been somewhere else and given the priest the World Seed fragment there, the storm would have missed you altogether and you wouldn’t have needed me at all. If you’re going to talk nonsense, be quiet and listen.”

“Yes, Ancient One,” Desverendi replied, but there was no meekness in his tone.

The Unspoken spokesman was reiterating his gratitude. “Alas, we have no tangible way to express our thanks.”

“The cliff we didn’t walk over is thanks enough,” Kerac pointed out.

“If you wouldn’t mind, though,” Saphira put in, “teaching me the shield ritual…I can sustain it, but I don’t know how to begin.”

“Of course, Kife, of course,” he replied eagerly. “You would honor us in the learning.”

“What is this ‘Kife’ he keeps calling her?” Klavicus asked.

Desverendi shook his head “I have no idea. It must be related to the string somehow. Do you know what function it is intended to serve?”

The daimon picked up several rocks and crushed them sequentially between his fingers. “No,” he finally said, his scowl expressing his displeasure with ignorance more eloquently than words. “I’ve never seen or heard of it before.”

The speaker, apologizing again for their inability to repay the Kife’s service, mentioned misfortune coming upon them near the mountains as part of the cause. “Beasts walking on two legs took nearly a dozen of us, and we who remain fled without many things.”

Kerac asked for a clearer description, and the man was only halfway through it when Desverendi and Klavicus looked at one another. “Hobgoblins,” the druid said. “I thought they had died out, like so many races.”

“Gone to ground. They haven’t been seen overworld for centuries upon centuries. But they’re a tough race – I would have been surprised if they weren’t still around.” The youths were asking where the other Unspoken had been taken. “I thought they were going to bury Alentha,” Klavicus grumbled.

“The sands will take care of that,” Desverendi said.

“That isn’t the human way.”

The druid made a dismissive gesture. “Only because they crowd themselves into spaces so tight that the mildest of pathogens threatens them all with destruction.”

“From high Tiran politics to this,” the daimon snorted. “You’d think they had better things to do than go chasing off after some ragtag tribe’s lost lambs in the Underdark.”

“We have given them no direction,” Desverendi pointed out. “And they are behaving, I believe, in a manner consistent with the Galeb Duhr’s intentions when he anointed them paladins.”

Klavicus grunted noncommittally, pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket and prepared it for lighting. “They’re going to be in for a rude shock.” At Desverendi’s puzzled glance he said, “Have you been underworld?”

The druid shook his head. “Maintaining life here consumes all of my time and energy. Why?”

The daimon took a hard draw on the pipe. “Oh, you’ll see.”

After resting a brief time with the Unspoken, the paladins made their way toward the mountains where the attack against their rescuers had occurred. The violent storm had long since erased any possible sign of which way they had gone, but after a brief consultation they decided to head for the foothills. “Logical enough,” Klavicus said. “If hobgoblins have never been seen by anyone overworld, presumably they won’t be heading to a city with their plunder.”

“It seems risky,” Desverendi said, “seizing slaves from the overworld. Someone might come looking for them.”

“Not if they’re careful. The desert covers tracks well, and – well, if they get that far, you’ll see the other problem.”

The youths were following a new trail of debris now, and found themselves confronting a nervous dwarf who was simultaneously gathering and attempting to hide broken poles and shredded bits of fabric. He was enjoying little success with either effort. After they had convinced him of their benevolent intentions he introduced himself as Rong and accepted their offer to help retrieve his broken belongings and return them to a nearby cave. “When the storm first began I thought the wind might be perfect for a little test but then it grew so strong so quickly that I thought I’d better take it down but then it grew so much stronger so much more quickly that it – ” he paused for his first breath, “well, it was quite ruined.”

“It?” Kerac asked.

The dwarf narrowed his eyes at them, calculating, then relaxed a little and said, “My flying machine, of course.”

Several of the youths suppressed smiles. “And has it flown?” Zane asked.

“Not yet, not yet,” Rong replied breezily, “but I get closer with every prototype.”

“And how many prototypes have you made?”

He counted on his fingers rapidly, repeating several times, then shook his head and dropped his hands. “Forty?”

Reign and Regan rolled their eyes, but the others gamely pressed on. “And what’s gone wrong?” Kerac said.

“Inferior materials! I can never get quite what I need.” He held up shards of broken poles. “More flexibility!” He flung a piece of fabric into the air, where it hovered for a moment before falling limp against his fingers. “Lighter weight!”

“Have you tried silk?” Zane asked.

“Yes, but it isn’t stiff enough.”

“Some kind of animal skin?” Regan put in with a sigh.

“Yes, but it’s too heavy. Well, dragon skin might do,” he lowered his voice, “but I think that would be very hard to come by.”

They promised to keep an eye out, and asked, speaking of eyes, if Rong during any of his scavenging or testing had found any passages into the mountains. He pointed them in the direction of a door he’d seen once, wished them an enthusiastic farewell and turned back to his work as if they’d never been there.

When they reached the place Rong had spoken of, they stared in silent astonishment. Fifty feet tall, the double doors were intricately carved with strange beings that Kerac could only identify as hobgoblins, minotaurs and demons because of his fascination with history. What he as well as his companions failed to identify was any means of opening them. Prying and pounding had no effect, and a night spent camped near the door hoping someone would emerge gained them nothing but chills. By then Zane had determined that the opening was sealed with arcane spells, and without meeting whatever requirements had sealed it or possessing the correct passphrase they could sit before it the rest of their lives and never get inside.

They explored nearby caves but none offered any adequate ingress to the mountain’s depths. They considered climbing in search of a higher entrance, but the sheerness of the mountainside was daunting. Reconnaissance was called for, but they shared the conviction that time was an enemy; the longer they spent looking for the slaves, the more likely they had changed hands to a new master still more difficult to find.

Kerac suggested enlisting Klavicus’ aid, but Regan and Zane demurred. “Do you know how to open them?” Desverendi asked the daimon.

“Once upon a time, yes. I don’t think I could now. Poor timing sending Sugar Primrose and Po off in search of Mahlanda. The druid might have done something with them.”

Desverendi gave him a sharp glance. “How?”

Klavicus shrugged.”I only said ‘might.’”

A discussion on how to proceed ended with a decision to head for a major city in search of supplies for Rong – if they could get his flying machine into the air, perhaps they could find a way into the mountain. They could expect a hostile welcome in Urik if they were recognized, but it was far closer than Tir and since time was of the essence they opted to get underway and trust to luck to provide a way in when they were closer.

As it happened they didn’t need to enter Urik at all. On the road just outside the city they encountered a pair of bickering slavers driving a wagon with a single occupant, swathed in blankets and completely hidden from casual inspection. The two men were arguing bitterly over opportunity costs and misjudgments regarding the value of their exotic but apparently undesirable property.

A slave wagon had gotten the young people out of Urik; they saw no reason why another one couldn’t get them back in. Saphira undertook negotiations with the slavers, which rapidly grew more complicated when she realized that their unwanted prize might have come from the very place the paladins were trying to get into. Her request to examine “the goods” met with the protestation that the creature was unable to endure sunlight – that was, in fact, the reason they were having so much trouble selling him.

Klavicus skipped the fire ahead to nightfall, murmuring, “Curiouser and curiouser,” as the slavers removed the man’s covering and a dark-skinned, pale-haired man with obvious burns on his body stood before them.

Desverendi stared intently at the flames. “Drow?” he exclaimed. “The drow survived as well?” He studied Klavicus’ expression. “You don’t precisely seem surprised.”

“Surprised that he is overworld, yes. Surprised at his existence, no. Don’t look at me like that,” he said as the druid’s gaze remained fixed on him. “If I began an exhaustive list of everything I know and didn’t stop until the end, the sun would have failed and the Dragon died of old age in his bed before I was finished.”

Desverendi frowned, but said nothing. The drow was introducing himself as Gendar, an antiquities dealer who had the misfortune to be captured in an unguarded moment and sold into slavery. He eyed them suspiciously. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” Kerac said.

“Nothing permanent,” Regan amended. “We’re looking for a way into a mountain.” She described the location.

“Yes, I can aid you,” Gendar said. “And that is all you want?”

“Possibly some information about what we’re walking into. But yes, that’s all.”

“How did you get caught?” Kerac asked.

“Business deal gone bad,” the drow replied. “I was acquiring a trinket for a client – nothing powerful, sentimental value – but someone apparently didn’t want me to deliver it.” He looked at them thoughtfully. “If you’re going to be poking around anyway…If you come across an ebony scepter, topped with a skull and a gem at its base, there’s, oh say, three hundred gold in it for you.”

“Our other business takes precedence,” Zane said, “but if we happen upon it we’ll bring it to you.”

They walked through the night, Saphira speeding their travels with rousing tunes. Gendar’s attempt to open the doors without witness crumbled before Reign and Regan’s not very thinly veiled threats. “We’re not planning on setting up a trade route or a colony,” Regan said. “But if something else that belongs overworld is – mislaid – down here, we will come back to retrieve it.”

After a long silence he nodded. “In the twists and turns of the labyrinth may the darkness consume you,” he recited.

As the door swung silently, slowly closed behind them Regan asked, “How do we get out again?” Gendar showed them. “And now we go back outside and try getting in,” she said. “In case there’s something about the passphrase you didn’t tell us.”

“It will take ten minutes to reset the door,” he complained.

“We can wait.”

Once inside he seemed eager to be away from them, and muttered darkly of dangers and intrigues. “Make for the Seven Pillared Hall,” he said. “That’s neutral ground, you’ll be safe enough there. What you’re looking for is likely to be in Blood Reaver territory though.”

“Blood Reavers?” Reign said.

“A coalition – more of a gang, really – of goblins, hobgoblins and bugbears. Rumor is they’ve allied with the duergar – dwarves,” he said at their uncomprehending looks, which grew no more certain at the thought of the kindly dwarves they knew consorting with thugs. “It’s the duergar likely want the slaves.”

“What do they do with them?”

“What does anyone do with slaves?” He looked at them as if he thought them dense. “Do the work you don’t want to do. If you want yours back you’d better hurry though. The duergar do have a way of using them up.”

They were walking down a long hallway now, tall pillars carved with statues flanking them on either side. Klavicus looked lost in memory. “Seventy-seven demons,” he murmured, “leading to the Seven Pillared Hall.”

“So you not only know how to open the doors,” Desverendi said, “you’ve been through them.”

“Often, in the old days.” The daimon relit his pipe. “But the demons are gone now, I suppose.”

There were alcoves set between some of the statues, and the youths paused before one from which voices emerged. “I’ll buy myself for five gold!” a thin, frightened but cultured voice said.

“No,” gruff tones responded.

“Ten!”

“Who is that?” Kerac asked.

“Sounds like the Blood Reavers have caught themselves a halfling.”

“A halfling?” Regan said. “But he sounds so educated. They’re all feral.”

“Feral?” Gendar laughed. “You folks live in one messed up world.”

“No denying that,” Regan muttered.

“What will happen to him?” Saphira asked.

“They’ll hand him over to the duergar, I expect.”

“What if we buy him?”

He looked her up and down. “You could try. I’d be surprised if you succeeded, but you could try.”

Regan frowned. “We’re here for slaves.”

“He’s going to be a slave.”

“We’re here for the Unspoken’s slaves,” the avenger amended. “We have to decide how much trouble we want to make – or attention draw – along the way.”

“We’re supposed to be paladins, aren’t we?” Zane pointed out, murmurs of assent greeting his words.

Regan shrugged then gestured toward the entry. “I’ll guard the hallway, keep anyone from getting out if they’re not in a negotiating mood.”

“I’ll join you,” Kerac said.

Reign and Zane accompanied Saphira, who was delegated to do the talking. Zane looked pointedly at Gendar.

“I’ll be over here,” the drow said. “Not getting killed.”

His remark proved prescient. The hobgoblins’ fear of their absent duergar employers proved more potent than their unease at five armed strangers, and though the ensuing conflict ended with the hobgoblins dead and the halfling still standing the conflict was unavoidable.

Rendil Halfmoon was an amiable fellow, as far removed from the halflings the young people encountered overworld as it would be possible to be and remain the same species. He grinned and waved as the drow stepped out of the shadows. “Gendar, you’re back! Do you have these fine folks to thank for your liberty as well?”

The drow muttered something unintelligible and skulked along behind as the group moved toward the Seven Pillared Hall. “You’ll have to stay at the Halfmoon Inn while you’re here – free of charge, of course,” Rendil chattered. “And have a few drinks. Erra – the innkeeper and my aunt – will be so relieved I’m all right.”

“I thought the Seven Pillared Hall was safe harbor,” Regan said, casting a sideways glance at Gendar.

“Oh it is, it is,” he assured them. “The mages keep everything orderly. You have nothing to fear, nothing at all, as long as you follow the rules.”

“The rules?” Zane said.

“They’re very straightforward, actually. Number one is don’t avoid taxes. That makes them angry. And don’t cause trouble in the Hall. Oh, and it’s not a bad idea not to get on Brugg’s bad side – he’s the ogre who keeps the peace on a day to day basis. Bad-tempered and not – ah, shall we say – overly bright, and he does like to throw his considerable weight around, but he has the mages’ imprimatur, so if you attract his attention I recommend walking away as soon as prudently possible.”

“If the Hall is safe, how did you fall in with the Blood Reavers?” Kerac said.

“Oh, I was – well, I was – I guess you could say – spying on them. They were nosing around the Halfmoon and I didn’t like that. I’m fond of Aunt Erra and – well, not the wisest thing I’ve ever done, and now that you’ve saved me from a most unfortunate fate – did I thank you? I think I did but in any case thank you again – I certainly won’t be trying that in any near, conceivable future.”

When they emerged from the dimly lit hallway into the Seven Pillared Hall the young people stopped as one and stared. “Impressive, isn’t it?” Rendil said, gesturing toward a massive statue of a minotaur that towered over the hall, intricate runes carved along its base. “If you have a complaint you may speak to the statue and Ordinator Arcinis – he’s one of the mages – appears to settle the dispute. A serious complaint, of course, it’s never wise to waste the mages’ time with frivolous – uh,” he broke off, “are you looking at the statue?”

“Of course they’re not,” Klavicus observed. Beside him, even the old druid’s eyes widened at the sight of a waterfall emerging from the shadowy heights of the cavern and spilling into a stream that ran through the center of town. The youths edged closer to it, allowing the spray to fall on faces animated with almost guilty pleasure. “I wonder if it’s against the rules to bathe in public…” Regan murmured, then shook herself and attended to what Rendil had said. “The mage who appears – is he human?”

“Yes, he – well, I’ve always assumed he was. He’s the right height, anyway. But he wears a mask – with human features – no expression on it,” he shuddered, “now that you mention it, it is a little creepy. But effective – you do feel as if you’re dealing with a force of law, not a man – individual – whatever he is.”

Desverendi felt Klavicus stir beside him and eyed him shrewdly. “Have you been to the Hall recently enough to have know what the halfling is talking about?”

“I saw Ordinator Arcinis once, briefly.” The daimon pursed his lips and blew through them softly. “Those mages know if a strange demon is about. They don’t like it much.”

“Surely you could have overcome their opposition.”

Klavicus laughed harshly and threw up his hands in frustration. “Why does everyone seem to think I’m omnipotent? I didn’t care to discover if I could or not. There was nothing there of particular importance to me – I was satisfying idle curiosity. Idle curiosity wasn’t worth the bother of conflict, so I left.” When Desverendi wrinkled his brow the daimon repeated more slowly, “Not – worth – the – bother. I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to be responsible for the carnage. Stop trying to turn me into some kind of cursed solar.”

Rendil was leading them on toward the Halfmoon Inn, peppering them with questions about the world above. He and Gendar shared more than one smug smile and knowing glance as the youths described the desperation wracking their ravaged world. From their expressions and slightly sagging shoulders, it was obvious that Skarp’s brood realized they had stumbled into lives much more comfortable than the ones they had known. “Laugh while you can, little underworlders,” Klavicus said, looking irritated.

“What do you mean?” Desverendi asked.

“That was a cushy corner of the Underdark: plentiful resources and the kind of environment that a balor or glabrezu could call a home away from home. There was so much contention it was dangerous even for me in the old days. These little maggots have spent centuries plundering the demon built and the demon owned and the unwillingly demon abandoned. If we succeed in shoving the Prime Material back to its rightful place in the multiverse there will be a reckoning, I expect. Balor and glabrezu have long memories.”

“So we will imperil a community that might have survived in the name of preserving our own?”

“The operative word there,” Klavicus reminded him sharply, “is might.”

“I do not mean that I would chart a different course,” the druid rumbled. “The Vale is my care, and I would not see it destroyed. But it is worth contemplating the unintended consequences of the things we do.”

Klavicus jabbed a finger in his direction. “Don’t any of you who goaded me into action start lecturing me about the virtues of contemplation now.”

“Yes, Ancient One,” Desverendi murmured, and this time there was a note of apology in his tone.

Skarp’s brood were gathered around a table in the Halfmoon Inn with Rendil, drinking ale and listening intently. Regan gulped hers down between bouts of mad scribbling on a piece of paper; the halfling talked volubly and rapidly and she seemed to be having difficulty keeping up. “The Blood Reavers skulk about in the Chamber of Eyes – I expect they’ll have taken your lost people there. Find a door carved with a dragon holding an orb and you’ll be on your way. Now if you happen upon a different door marked with a stylized T, that leads to the Shining Road and you’ll want to stay away from there. That’s something to do with Torog. Not that the Chamber of Eyes doesn’t as well – rumor has it that it’s a shrine dedicated to him, built by the minotaurs, who were struck down by the god Baphomet for playing both sides of the deific coin, as it were – but that’s neither here nor there for you, I suppose, as neither – ”

“Wait,” Regan waved a frustrated hand, “who is Torog?”

“The King that Crawls is another name for him. He was said to be rather froglike in form and – and – ” words failed him for a moment, “to be honest I don’t know much more about him than that. He’s not the sort of god you want to think about too much, not like lovely Erathis. The Temple of Hidden Light here is dedicated to her – you might want to drop by there if you have time, pay your respects – it’s a dangerous thing you’re meaning to do and a little more support, even of the intangible kind, couldn’t hurt, you know.”

The remainder of his information was more pedestrian: House Azaer might have supplies if they needed any although the tiefling Naristo was not the friendliest individual Rendil had ever met. The Grimmerzhul duergar might have parts for a flying machine. Terrlen Darkseeker was the best guide thereabouts if they needed someone to show them around the deep places, Bennik the Wanderer was the local bard and told a good tale or two.

Saphira looked puzzled. “Azaer is a merchant house based out of Urik. It sounds from your description as if this Terrlen and Bennik are human. But we’ve never heard of any of this. How did they?”

“Azaer knows a good thing when they see it,” Klavicus informed the flames. “They’re not going to risk their profits.”

“Most of the humans were born here,” Rendil said. He bit at his lower lip. “And at the risk of sounding offensive – the overworld doesn’t sound very appealing. We have a good life here – Blood Reavers and vicious duergar aside – but our resources aren’t limitless. A stampede of desperate overworlders – well, that would just ruin things for everyone, wouldn’t it?”

After assuring him as they had Gendar that they had no plans for sending along hordes of overworld refugees, they thanked him for his hospitality and made their way to the Temple of Hidden Light. Its door warden, a Dragonborn named Surina, eyed them suspiciously. “You came with the drow, didn’t you?”

“We rescued him from overworld slavers and in return he led us here, where we have business with – ” Regan paused a moment, “other individuals who have taken things that don’t belong to them.”

“You have business with the Blood Reavers then. If you aren’t going to kill the drow, you could at least kill some hobgoblins. Or duergar. The world would be a much better place if their races were eradicated.”

Regan opened her mouth to reply, but Zane tapped her on the shoulder. “Some will likely die as a side effect,” he said, and when the Dragonborn responded with a grim smile said, “May we we enter the temple?” She nodded and swung the door open.

Phaledra was yet another human, a pretty, quiet woman who had lived underworld her entire life and knew nothing of the world above. Hearing of their mission she was quick to offer the temple’s services should they be needed. “We can supply some healing, perhaps even the raising of dead – ” the young people looked at one another nervously, “of course, more services might be available if I understood rather more of your character. Everywhere you look there are people who need aid. Aiding them would, of course, earn you Erathis’ favor.”

Upon leaving a fifty gold donation with the temple they went in search of the object of Phaledra’s most intense worry, a human named Vadriar the Sage. They found him wandering the street with a heavy backpack stuffed with books and scrolls; Phaledra said he had traveled to the deep places for scholarly information but came back drastically changed. When he saw them his first impulse was to flee and it took all of Saphira’s skill to calm him. Even then when asked about his plight he could do no more than scratch a T in the sand with his foot before resuming his helpless stammering.

“This ‘He Who Crawls’ – Torog, perhaps?” Saphira suggested after they left him.

“Could very well be,” Zane said. He had studied the man’s movements intently. “His behavior is consistent with someone suffering a geas or similar curse. Not your garden variety curse either. Something very powerful.”

Regan made more notes, and now it was Zane’s turn to remind her that they were here primarily to retrieve the Unspoken’s lost companions. But she still insisted on looking for a creature the bard Bennik had mentioned, a beggar with the singular name of Chrrak who claimed to know the Dragon. They found him, in a dark corner of the Hall, bundled into a pile of dirty blankets and rags. He was as strange a creature as Bennik claimed, and if Zane hadn’t had a vision through Po’s sword, of the Archmage Tenser and his peculiar looking apprentice Meepo, they wouldn’t have known his race.

“It’s a – but it can’t be!” Desverendi exclaimed.

Klavicus’ brow furrowed. “It can’t be, but it is. How he managed to keep alive all this time I can’t even begin to imagine. Kobolds have nothing like that kind of life span.”

He was a sneaking, sniveling thing, aggrieved and boastful by turns, claiming that he was a warlord who should have been a king. At the latter claim he emerged from his blankets and began to strut about, but leapt back and hid when the Dragon was mentioned. “How did you survive?” Zane asked.

“I wasn’t there, I wasn’t!” he sniffled. “I was here, I was here all along, deep, down deep, that’s why he didn’t find me…not like the hobgoblins found the drow,” he changed the subject abruptly. “You came with the drow, didn’t you? He was poisoned, you know, poisoned at the Halfmoon by someone like putty.”

“Someone like putty?” Reign said. “What do you mean?”

“Why would he accept a drink from a stranger?” Regan asked. “He seems very suspicious to me.”

“Didn’t know it was a stranger. Looked like someone he knew. Thought he was safe, but he passed out and they carried him away, carried him away and sold him like cattle.”

Amidst all the stops and starts and mutters and asides it didn’t dawn on them to ask what ‘cattle’ were; instead they asked if Chrrak knew who the ‘person like putty’ was.

“Three hundred gold.” He held out his hand and the change in his manner was stunning. He was no longer unfocused, no longer cowering. “Three hundred gold and I’ll find out. I’m good at finding things out.”

After conferring among themselves briefly they agreed to his terms. They intended to question him further but heard the sound of heavy boots behind them. “The odious Brugg,” Klavicus observed, and after a brief, unfriendly exchange they reluctantly took Rendil’s advice, mollifying the ogre as best they could and then hurrying out of his sight.

“All right, it’s time to do something practical,” Zane said. “Let’s find this Terrlen Darkseeker.”

In spite of the psion’s dogged intentions they were distracted once more, this time by Orontor, a mage at the custom house who when he heard they were heading for the labyrinth’s asked them to keep an eye out for another mage. “Paldemar is his name, and he’s gone missing. My suspicion is he’s either dead or up to something he shouldn’t be. I can’t get away, and ordinarily I wouldn’t ask strangers for help, but then ordinarily we don’t get strangers I expect to see come back out of the labyrinth ever again. I’ll pay you – 900 gold pieces and a quality item of magic – for information about him. Significant information, mind you, not a rumor of a robe you saw disappearing down some dark hallway. That said, if you do see him stay out of his way. He’s no pushover, and well-armed as you are you’d be made of sterner stuff than the casual glance suggests if you could handle him.”

Even Zane’s impatience was mollified somewhat by the promise of nine hundred gold, and they accepted Orontor’s commission respectfully before at last making their way to Terrlen. He was, to Zane’s relief, the first laconic individual they’d encountered in the Hall. “I’ll broker for you with the merchants,” he said. “They’re in the habit of ripping off anyone they don’t expect to see again, and that’d be any strangers. Take ten percent for myself, but that’s less than they’d charge, I assure you. As for where you’re headed…I’m not one to turn down coin, but you don’t need me to get to the Chamber of Eyes. Go through the dragon-marked door, follow the double-lined marked path, turn into the lintel marked with five staring eyes. And don’t expect a warm welcome.”

“And if the people we’re looking for aren’t in the Chamber of Eyes?” Zane said.

Terrlen stroked his chin thoughtfully. “If they were taken for the duergar – and we have no reason to believe otherwise – then they’d be put to labor in the Horned Hold. For their sake and yours, hope that they aren’t there yet. Or that you can move very quickly.”

Klavicus let the fire die down as the youths made their way back to the Halfmoon to rest for the night before heading out early in the morning. “Nice little laundry list of irrelevant chores they’ve accumulated,” he grumbled.

“Irrelevant?” Desverendi said. “At least this world seems more black and white than ours. Call it schooling in the long lost art of being a paladin.”

The daimon rose and headed for his own begrudged night’s rest. “We shall see, won’t we?”

The old elemental sighed. “I expect to convince himself that he still can.”

A cloud of dust drifted toward them from further up the vale, and Sugar Primrose hastily covered her hair with a scarf. “Can’t you ask him to stop?”

“I could,” Desverendi nodded, “but I won’t. Nevertheless, I hope the Great One,” there was perhaps only a hint of sarcasm in his gravelly voice, “decides to go home soon.”

* * *

Balor do not dream. They are not born from a mother’s womb. They are not helpless young. If Klavicus had not at least read of these things, of dreaming and of birth and of helplessness, the ritual he performed in Urik would likely have driven him permanently mad, if he had survived it at all. As it was it tested his sanity in ways he was not eager to experience again.

He knew early on that something was wrong, but there was no stopping the rite once it was begun; he had to trust to his own raw power to see him over any obstacles, and his not inconsiderable intelligence to determine what those obstacles were. He had too many candidates for comfort. He knew that only Kerac had a genuine piece of the World Seed and that the others were merely facsimiles. He didn’t know whether that would be a problem. He knew that having to repair the damaged facsimiles (it was fortunate that Kerac had guarded his holy symbol with more care than the other clerics, or the rite couldn’t have begun at all) was going to cost him power he intended to use for the ritual. He didn’t know whether the cost would prove too high. He knew it was possible that being alien to Oerth would be a problem. He didn’t know whether being a balor would make the problem worse.

It felt like being torn apart, whatever in him was of Earth or Air, Water or Fire being drawn toward each of the elemental poles he had erected. All the energy he could muster was funneled into maintaining some still, small center of awareness that could hold his body together and his mind apart from the maelstrom he had become. He used the shadow on the wall to track his progress; as the bat-like wings shrank and something more gossamer grew in their place, there was no longer any denying to himself what he had done. He had taken the first step on the path to becoming an Avangion, and there was no turning back.

As time passed he began to wish he could. He had expected the ritual to be lengthy but not this long; he guessed that there would be remaking involved but did not expect to be hours trapped immobilized between larva and imago. The shell of his body remained the same but the core of him seemed to be dissolving, reforming, and the more radical the changes the more grimly he held fast to what was left. It is like shapeshifting, he told himself, nothing more. The body may do what it will, but the foundation – the thoughts and emotions – remain unaltered. A quiet voice within him questioned the veracity of that belief, but he crushed it back into submission whenever it uttered more than a few syllables.

As time passed he could feel his strength ebbing. The wings on the wall fluttered between leathery solidity and an almost energetic insubstantiality, and a darker corner of his mind began to admit that he was snared. The way back was closed to him. He had lost the way ahead. The elemental altars would drain him to a dry husk, another failed pupa that did not live to see the spring.

Still he did not give up; it was not in his nature. Even when Jaggo’s wards failed – if he survived this he and the mage were going to have words – and the room filled with Urikite guards, though his body was weak he still possessed ample force of will to stun them in their tracks before bending his thoughts again toward what precisely was blocking his forward progress. Let Skarp’s brood make themselves useful, he thought as everyone save Kerac moved in for the kill.

But then a discordant wail of frustration filled his ears. The sword of a sleek, self-satisfied lieutenant commander that Klavicus had seen swaggering about Urik shrilled a demand for blood. He knew that sound. In a more violent time of his life he’d had more than one of those blades swung at some tender part of his anatomy by righteous zealots. How it had survived the birth of the Dragon and all the centuries after was a mystery to him, but what was not a mystery was what would happen as the weapon tore itself free from its stunned wielder’s hand and hurtled toward the immobilized balor.

For the first time in all the millennia of his existence, Klavicus knew that he was going to die.

He felt the specially treated alloys tear through the flesh of his side, cut his ribs like paper, pierce his heart. In that moment all of his erudition, his cool calculation, his studied detachment from the world and himself were lost. He was a being of pure instinct now, and everything in him that was demonic recoiled in agony from the bite of that blade, raged against his life’s ending, gathered itself up to exact terrible retribution for his fate.

And in that moment the quiet voice within him had a moment to have its way. Not a paladin. Not a planetar. Not a paragon. Not a despoiler. Not a defiler. Not a demon. Then what? The path ahead is dark and strange, too strange, too dark…But in the room were seven lights, weak in power but strong in purpose, the promise for which he had walked this path. Then let them light the way.

In death’s final fever dream he saw them: a man as solid as Oerth itself; a woman bearing a staff that glittered like the heavens. A woman whose harp strings taut soothed damned souls, untwined condemned them to that damnation. A man who distilled the mind to two poles, dark and light in the ceaseless dance of attraction and repulsion; a woman who perfected her body in service to the dance of death. A man who wore his commitment to protect the weak as lightly as a feathered bird; a woman who stalked the shadows to have revenge on their behalf whenever his protection failed.

The quiet voice abandoned the center, tore itself space for a new reality, peopled it with those seven lights. And then it waited, to see what they would make of it. They were slow to understand where they were, what was required. The fragments of metamorphosis were all there, within his body, within his mind, but they could not assemble themselves into the coherent pattern that would become an Avangion. Skarp had gently mocked Mahlanda for her impurity, the inescapable taint of corruption within her, but how much more corrupt then a balor? He was no paladin. He was no paragon. However strong the will and desire to repair and renew, the template for renewal and repair was written nowhere in his nature. They wrote it for him, Skarp’s children, even as the demon fought them, and when he returned them to the place of the ritual, mere fractions of a second after they had left, the warrior picked up his almost lifeless body and they bore him away from Urik.

They thought he was unconscious, but rather he was diffuse, his body too paltry a thing to contain an expanded awareness. It was as if he had taken the elemental altars into himself and everything of which they were the building blocks besides. Past, present and hints of the future loomed around him as large as the desert wastes. Desires crowded him – his own and others, so many others – and he found it difficult to fix himself in a space and time. He had told them – had he told them? – Toward Tyr, but not by the road, and sometimes he had the feeling of wheels and a road beneath him but then the feeling would flit away and another would take its place – a buzzard searching for thermals, a thri-kreen searching urgently for something, an angry Urikite soldier hunting for the men and women who had killed his commander.

His consciousness was a gaping wound exposed to every living thing over a miles’-wide radius, and while he knew it needed to be closed, communicating that need was immensely difficult. Had he told Skarp’s brood? Had he told the thri-kreen? Had he told the buzzard?

On the sixth day he realized it was easier, though by no means easy, to communicate by dreams rather than speech, and this time when he told them Toward Tyr, but not by the road, the road was left behind them. On the seventh day the thri-kreen came, and with their powerful psionic ability stabilized a path through the confusion of thoughts and emotions and enabled him to communicate more plainly where he wished to go. To the Vale. To Desverendi. He had no idea if the old druid could help him, but if he couldn’t then no one could. Certainly he could no longer help himself.

They made for the Vale with dispatch, but might not have found it if Desverendi hadn’t sent one of his creatures to lead the way. Its tiny thoughts began chirping to him miles before the youths with whom he traveled saw it. I am coming, Great One. My master can help, Great One. Preparations are already begun. As it trilled its reassurance he felt similar refrains taken up all around him, from the thri-kreen walking beside him to the buzzards overhead, from kanks and scorpions and all of the other desert creatures. We are with you, Great One. We are here. Great One, you must survive, for our sakes and the sake of the world. He let the currents wash over him; he lacked the strength to do anything else.

As from a great distance he heard Desverendi instruct Skarp’s youths to place him in a pool of water. There was great anxiety within the Vale, and raging anger without. Within the vale all of its creatures gathered fearfully to watch as their elemental keeper placed Kerac, Sugar Primrose and a woman Klavicus did not know at the four points of the compass around the pool and dispatched the others to guard the secret entrances. Without the enemies Desverendi guarded against were coming, warriors and defilers with murder on their minds. And Klavicus could do nothing but hover on the surface of the water and wait, absorbing all of the anxiety and anger and determination through the rift torn in his spirit.

Almost as soon as the rite began the rift began to close, and he couldn’t help but be grateful for that. Soon the cacophony of the entire desert had dwindled to the strife within the Vale, and that was enough for his fevered mind and damaged body to cope with. An assassin slunk into their midst, and though he gave Desverendi a wide berth he struck down the woman cleric. She like her three co-ritualists was helpless before his assault, knowing as they all did that any disruption now meant irreversible failure.

Po rushed to revive her while Zane hovered nearby to take her place if needed. Once, twice, three times the paladin brought her back while the assassin moved on to harry Sugar Primrose and Kerac. Saphira and Reign with two of the thri-kreen held back the Black Sand Raiders while Regan and the remaining pair of thri-kreen struggled to defend against the Urikite half-giants, archers and defiler.

At first the luck of combat was against them, and in his half-conscious haze Klavicus more than half-expected the ritual to fail at the last and the Vale to be his tomb. The assassin sorely injured Sugar Primrose, and Regan might have fallen to the Urikite archers and their commanding defiler if Po hadn’t snapped at her to retreat and regroup. But then the tide began to turn. Saphira and Reign were dispatching their opponents so handily that the warrior fell back to bedevil the assassin, and a frustrated Regan finally slipped invisibly past the half-giants to hunt down the defiler.

By the time the assassin fell the arrival of a second defiler was no more than a temporary inconvenience. Skarp’s youths had found their center again, and none of the remaining attackers survived the ferocity of their assault. The ritual finished. The psychic rift closed. Klavicus was himself and no one else again; he opened his eyes, looked at the worried faces gathered around him, and scowled. “Help me out of here,” he grumbled to Desverendi.

He could not stand unaided – he could barely stand at all – but at least he wasn’t dead. It rankled to lean against the old druid before his saviors – he could barely form the word in his mind – so young and fresh-faced and eager, every last one of them with a paladin’s heart. Well, there’s some amusement to that, he thought, the paladins saving a demon.

But he wasn’t a demon anymore, was he? A casual glance in the pool told him that. The reflection looking back at him was the form he’d always taken masquerading as a human, now with slender gossamer wings and metallic golden eyes. The image caused him some discomfort, and he quickly looked away. If he was a balor no longer, what was he?

Skarp’s youths were still watching him expectantly, and although he felt like ordering them to stop staring at him like some circus attraction instead he offered an attenuated bow. “My thanks for your assistance,” he said, his voice weaker than he expected. “I need to rest now.”

Klavicus’ frailty was a source of great irritation to him, and though they tarried some time in the Vale Skarp’s youths wisely stayed away. As soon as he was well enough to rise and stagger about Desverendi brought him a walking stick fashioned from some of the sturdy wood of the vale. Armed with it he walked, and walked, and walked, nearly to the point of collapse until Desverendi came to him again. “You must sleep, Ancient One,” he said.

“Sleep?” Klavicus snarled. “I’ve never slept a night in my life.”

“Nevertheless…”

“Why should I sleep?” His eyes narrowed. “I haven’t made myself into some puny mortal, have I?”

“I do not believe so.” Desverendi met the daimon’s glare with equanimity. “It is more proper, perhaps, to say that you must dream. Dreams strengthen your tie to Oerth.”

“I’ve been tied to the elements for millennia.”

“It is not enough.” He gestured toward the plants around them, and the insects, animals and birds that still persisted in following the Preserver wherever he went. “You must learn to hear their voices as well.”

“Does the other – ” he bit off the sentence and began anew, “does the Avangion sleep?”

“I do not believe so. But he has achieved apotheosis. You have not.”

“And never will, if I have any say in it,” Klavicus muttered under his breath. “I have no intention of going through that nine more times.”

Though the young people avoided him occasionally he watched them, at a distance so they would not know that he was there. Saphira and Kerac spent some time puzzling over his holy symbol, and from somewhere in her trove of lore the bard plucked out the obscure legend of the World Seed and wedded it to the talisman Kerac bore. The discovery disturbed them, as well it might, but Klavicus had no interest in shedding light on their dark forebodings. Too much knowledge gained all at once, he had learned over the millennia, was generally a counterproductive thing.

Zane often sat in solitary meditation, with the orb before him. Sugar Primrose spent long hours in Desverendi’s company, but sometimes when she believed herself alone she would stare at the staff and her own reflection in the water. Klavicus had felt the staff draw something of himself into it and into her, but knew no more than she what that might mean.

Po and Reign sparred together for hours. Sometimes Regan joined them but more often she practiced alone with her katana. She seemed distracted and sloppy; when Klavicus spoke of it to Desverendi the druid replied that she was angry that Alentha died because of their inaction. “The anger is good,” Klavicus remarked. “The clumsiness is not.”

* * *

On the third day after his transformation the Avangion came to the Vale. The wings of light seemed to droop a little as he bobbed around the daimon. Today I almost regret not being corporeal.

Klavicus carefully lowered himself onto a moss-covered rock. “Desverendi is proving an adequate nursemaid.”

He tended me as well, when I underwent the change.

“Alone?” The daimon glared at him. “Then why did I have to go through all that rigmarole in Urik?”

Oerth is weary. The defilers’ predations complicate the change. And your – nature – made it more difficult still.

“As did not knowing what I was doing. You might have told me the ritual required psionic talent,” Klavicus growled.

How could I have known? the Avangion replied. I was many things. As well have said you must be a kobold. The injury you sustained, he floated nearer, did not help.

Klavicus waved the Avangion away, but the gesture lacked its usual strength. “No matter what the Galeb Duhr chose to christen me, I am – ” he hesitated, “was – a balor. With so many things lost, who would have thought that lieutenant would have a demon-slaying sword in his possession?”

I do not think they knew you were a demon.

He fingered the healing wound in his side and winced. “Small comfort, that.”

As if in response to his passing pain a half dozen small creatures gathered around him. He scowled at their appearance. “Does this stop?” he demanded.

In time.

A scorpion climbed onto his knee and stared up at him. Klavicus’ fingers twitched toward it as if he meant to crush it, but instead he let it scramble onto his palm. He held it at eye level, scrutinizing it for a time. “Don’t expect me to start singing with the Whos in Whoville,” he grumbled, then set it back on the ground. The Avangion’s light flickered in a complicated pattern of colors. “What are you laughing at?”

It is well, the Avangion chuckled, that in all ways you have not changed.

* * *

As Klavicus mended he discovered that, though his appearance had altered, his physical strength was waxing with his recovery. By the sixth day he was strong enough to smash through boulders with his fists, and for several days he did little else. In idle moments he supposed he was disturbing the other residents of the Vale, but truth be told he didn’t particularly care. Desverendi gave him occasional long-suffering glances but if anything that encouraged him to redouble his destructive labors. He had been outside the Vale now, had seen that it was expanding, and that the plants within were growing more lush and fertile with every day that he remained.

It had been a long time, in fact, since he had been a balor of the Abyss in anything but name. Sybarite, scholar, archmage, elemental priest: each of those roles he had worn as easily and well as his favorite velvet paisley coat. But to have flowers springing up in his wake and baby kank gamboling at his feet…this time life was asking a bit much.

“An undead demon known as an immoleth.” Hanen was convinced the words would mean nothing to the cleric, but tried anyway. “It’s known for two things: the intense heat of its flames and its hatred for all living things.”

The cavernous space of Klavicus’ thorax was dark save for the immoleth’s fire, and judging from the sheen on the young people’s faces and the damp hair clinging to their foreheads, almost intolerably hot. But they ignored their discomfort and spoke urgently among themselves as they glanced from the immoleth to a ringing, pulsing red crystal high above them. A glittering ramp leaned against the crystal on one end and disappeared into the darkness of the chest cavity at the other. Silver droplets shivered from it whenever the crystal throbbed. “I wonder what that’s for?” Hanen muttered to himself.

“It is the sword, is it not?” Skarp replied.

Taking a closer look Hanen saw that he was right. The blade’s point lay embedded within the crystal, and with each shuddering pulse the crystal was trying to eject it. The bard folded his arms across his chest, over his own heart. He didn’t particularly want to watch this, watch the old balor dying in such an intimate fashion – and if this demiplane was a projection of his injury it was growing more obvious by the moment that he couldn’t possibly survive – but he also couldn’t force himself to look away.

Regan was gesturing to the crystal, looking at Po and Reign. Po shook his head definitively, and Reign uncoiled a rope from her shoulder and began scrambling up the ribs in the direction of the crystal while the others turned to the immoleth. “They’d better hurry,” Hanen muttered. When the cleric looked at him expectantly he said, “I’ve been in a few battles in my day, and I’ve watched others fight. They held their own against the black dragon, but if they try to take that immoleth head on it’ll burn them up like paper.”

“They mustn’t,” Skarp murmured. “They mustn’t.”

For a brief moment Hanen thought he had misjudged them, and was glad of it. Seeing Reign climbing toward the crystal the immoleth immediately honed in on her, gripping her in a fiery embrace. But she wrestled free and Sugar Primrose fixed it in place with a spell, then Regan did the same with another, giving the warrior time to flee.

Zane conjured an astral construct as a distraction, but even that bought them at most a few seconds and they knew it. Saphira grabbed the rope and took up the free climb that Reign had begun while Po, encumbered in his armor, waited impatiently at its other end, but the tides of fate were turning against them. “They’re treating everything like a real-world enemy.” Hanen shook his head. “They still don’t understand.”

He stole a look at Skarp; the old priest’s gaze was fixed on the scene before them, his mouth tight with strain and his expression bleak. “For the daimon to destroy the children…” he said softly. “This should not be.”

Hanen was leaned far forward in his chair without realizing it, his hands clenching the arms hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He had no particular attachment to these children of Skarp’s, but he had questions to ask of Klavicus, and if hope against hope there was a road to saving him he wanted to see it taken. “It’s his story,” he snapped at the heedless currents of air. “Stop being so damned literal.”

Desperate now, Sugar Primrose cried out in frustration. “There’s a ritual, vines could ease the climb but it will take too long…”

But even as she said the words the staff itself began to sprout, heightening and thickening, branches low and high twining around vertebrae and ribs, making the difficult scramble trivial. Stars glittered among the foliage, dimly for a moment and then bursting into a pure white light that illuminated the entire space and outshone the lurid glow of the immoleth.

Hanen sank back, now glancing openly at the priest. “If only they’re not too late.”

“Too late for what?” Skarp asked.

Hanen said nothing; replying with Whatever it is they need to do seemed hopelessly banal under the circumstances. Their passage aided by Sugar Primrose’s staff they all began to swarm toward the crystal, the strange ebon horses’ instruction – kill him – uppermost in their thoughts. “Why are we doing this?” Reign suddenly shouted. “What is the difference between us destroying the crystal and letting the sword do it for us?”

That brought everyone to a near standstill, even in the midst of conflict. The immoleth seized the advantage and leapt after Po who, trained in martial arts but somewhat less in the art of brawling, wrestled fruitlessly to escape its grasp. “Whatever you do,” he choked out as his clothes began to smolder, “do it quickly.”

Just then Saphira looked down at her harp and realized that it was resonating to the sharp chime emitted by the crystal; she played a few very soft, exploratory chords, then settled on a minor key and strummed with more authority. The effect on the crystal was dramatic: its spasming resistance to the sword’s progress lessened and its very substance seemed to soften.

Scarcely less galvanizing was the effect on her companions. “About time,” Hanen grumbled as they examined their weapons and implements with fresh eyes, eyes that finally saw them as Klavicus saw them and wondered at last what that meant. Reign’s kukri were only a blur in her hand; the two halves of Zane’s orb circled one another energetically. Regan tapped her sword against a rib; it cut through it as if it were water.

Their enemy, the immoleth, was altering as well. Its form burned a cool blue now, and Po was not injured by its touch. The paladin’s sword billowed out into not just a feather but an entire wing, the fire demon sprouted a wing to match it, and arm in arm, two beings joined in a single flight, they rose toward the quieting crystal.

The tension remained on Opa Skarp’s face but was mingled now with fascination. “They are making an oasis in a blighted place,” he murmured.

Hanen was more inclined to call it a mirage, a pretty, transitory hallucination to ease the passing of an ancient soul, but this was not the time to quibble over narrative interpretation. Reign was still hesitant, unsure of what action to take. “Maybe we have to kill him,” Regan said.

“But why?” Reign persisted.

“I don’t know,” the avenger shrugged, “but my sword is all I have. I’m going to get that sword – ” she jerked her head toward the demon-slaying blade, “out of there.”

She jumped onto the lowest branch of the tree and began to climb. As the altar’s perspective matched hers, Hanen noticed that the tree – the staff – was absorbing material from the bone and flesh on which it grew. For a moment he shifted the view to Sugar Primrose and with a start realized that her eyes were glowing red. He shifted back quickly, hoping Skarp hadn’t noticed. The old priest probably had enough to worry about now.

Regan was just below the point of intersection between the crystal and the sword by then. She reached up and with with less effort than running a knife through cheese severed the connection between them. “I wouldn’t have stood there – ” Hanen began, then winced as a shower of molten metal dropped toward her. She managed to dodge most of it, grimacing as her lower legs took the brunt of the hot alloys. Kerac was right behind her, and when the demon-slaying sword resumed its advance he slipped his holy symbol between it and the crystal. The symbol held fast, and by exerting a little effort he discovered that he could even push it further away.

They had reached a moment’s equilibrium, but what did it mean? The sword was held at bay, the crystal hummed a low, calm tone; the outline of a ghostly heart lay superimposed upon it, but the crystal itself was growing no more organic. The immoleth hovered with Po, watchful but mute, and the youths looked blankly at one another. “Now what?” Reign asked again.

“We’re supposed to kill it, aren’t we?” Po said, and before anyone could suggest a different course of action and dragging the immoleth with him he attacked.

A sudden surge of power knocked them all sprawling, and a strident keening filled the cavity. Giving Po a rueful glance Saphira retrieved her harp and begin to play again, to soothe the restless demon. “Maybe not that,” she murmured. Kerac laid a healing hand on the crystal and felt it grow more malleable beneath his touch. Others joined him, and under their collective ministrations soon an organic heart beat where the crystal had been before, but given Po’s ill-advised assault they were reluctant to approach it aggressively again.

Zane studied the immoleth thoughtfully. “I’ll see if I can reach it.” He spoke no words and made no motion toward it, but Hanen had lived long with psions and knew he was reaching for its mind. After a moment’s concentration he said, “Change. Kill. Replace.”

“We have changed it,” Po protested, “and I tried – ”

“Reign,” Regan cut him off, looking at the now nearly invisible blades in the warrior’s hands. “Before he can react.”

Reign nodded and readied herself. “But replace it with what – ?” Kerac began the question and then his gaze fell on the immoleth. The others followed his eyes and murmured a collective assent. It made a certain sense.

A deep sigh from Skarp made Hanen realize that both of them had been holding their breath. “Perhaps it will finish now,” the priest said.

Hanen gave him a sharp glance. “Perhaps?”

Skarp’s answering look was cool. “Until our view grows wider than this – demiplane – it is impossible to say, is it not?”

The bard frowned and turned his attention back to the currents of air. Reign struck a skillful blow. Po, unsure whether he would survive the act, dedicated his deed to the Avangion and flew with the immoleth into the heart. Leaving unscathed, he returned to the others and waited as…nothing happened. After a time a voice from the region of the heart, or the immoleth, said faintly, “No…strength…”

Breath grew in short supply in Klavicus’ desert home again as the young people looked at one another in renewed confusion. Moments that felt like hours passed before it was suggested to Zane that he had not yet made use of his orb. “Of course,” Hanen mused, “he wouldn’t draw in anyone idly.” Zane stared at the orb for long moments more and then began to channel raw psionic power through it, but before Hanen could see what effect, if any, it achieved the currents of air at the altar flashed a blinding white that obscured his vision.

And then the view returned to the room where the ritual had begun. Hanen clenched his hand into a fist as a surge of energy centered on the demon-slaying blade embedded in the balor’s side burst forth, knocking everyone except Kerac, who was strangely immovable, back against the walls. The sword ejected itself with violent force and flew back at its wielder, shattering the man’s arm. But no ball of fire followed, and though Klavicus lay still as death upon the floor his body was still there, unconsumed by balor flames. Hanen permitted himself, for the first time, some tiny amount of hope.

Po, Reign and Regan scrambled to their feet, weapons at the ready. There were signs of a battle – some of the Veiled Alliance lay unconscious and bleeding on the ground, as did the Urikite guards – that Klavicus’ second surge of energy had again interrupted. But the quiet wouldn’t last forever. Alentha hurried to them. “We have to get out of here, now.”

Kerac looked up from where he crouched beside Klavicus, fingers pressed against the side of his neck. “He’s alive.”

The bard’s hand relaxed; beside him Opa Skarp looked equally relieved. “Alive,” Hanen murmured.

Reign bent down and slung the daimon over her shoulder. “Then let’s move.”

“Not that way,” Alentha scolded Regan as she made for the way they had come. She slid aside a hidden panel in one wall. “Through the sewers. It won’t get you outside the city gates, but you’ll be far away from here.”

“How do we get through the gates?” Zane asked.

Alentha shifted uncomfortably. “The least conspicuous would be a – ah – slave wagon. We’d have to shackle you – lightly, for appearances,” she added hurriedly as she met with scowls on every face. “One of you could ride with the driver if you would be more – comfortable.”

They seemed not overly fond of the idea, but agreed, and elected Saphira to be their eyes, ears and tongue. Although the lieutenant commander’s demon-slaying sword had been destroyed, killing him in the process, Zane insisted on pausing to strip him of his remaining armor as booty, and over Regan’s objections Sugar Primrose left the slowly reviving guards a few elemental presents to remember her by.

Their flight was proceeding as smoothly as could be expected and they were nearing the city gates when a panicked-looking man came running toward the wagon, waving his arms and looking at Saphira with cautious recognition. “You! You!” he called. “Have you purchased goods from the merchant Dali Fen Siri Trator?”

Looking as if she feared attracting more attention if she tried to ignore him than otherwise, Saphira acknowledged him. “Yes, we did.”

“His stash!” the man shouted, growing no calmer for the assent. “Do you have his stash?” She nodded. “I need it! You must sell it to me!”

She studied him with a look of mild disapproval, no doubt seeing a desperate addict separated from his supply. But if he were sufficiently desperate…“We need to get through the gates with minimal interference,” she said. “Provide us a distraction and it’s yours.”

“Done,” he agreed, even as Regan was hissing, “Not all of it,” at Saphira. The bard separated a small portion for the avenger and tossed the rest to the stranger. He caught it with a sigh of relief, then began running for the gates. Even as he ran, though there was no obvious spark his pants began to smolder and then burst into flame. The gate guards were so taken aback by the sight that it took them a moment when he dashed past to gather their wits and chase after him, leaving only a single sentinel behind, and even that guard gave the unexceptional wagon the merest glance before sprinting after his comrades.

It was too curious an incident for Hanen to let pass. Skarp, of course, wanted to follow the wagon into the desert, but Hanen’s facility with the elemental altars was gradually returning and he allowed the youths’ progress to play out in the air currents while flames leapt up from the small, ever-burning fire to follow the source of their distraction.

* * *

The man eluded the guards easily and sped further into the desert, extinguishing the flames – which had done no particular harm to his clothing – as soon as he was out of sight. Anxiety contorting his face, he slowed only slightly in spite of the heat, accelerating again as three thin columns of smoke were visible to his sight.

Four wagons met his gaze. Three were burned to char and one, with a wheel that was mounted somewhat off center, was completely undamaged. An agitated man was poking through the rubble with a spoke. “Master Fen?” the new arrival said in a soft, soothing voice.

In spite of his care in approaching he had to hurl himself to the ground to avoid a powerful gout of flame erupting from the other man’s hands. “Why are you still standing?” the attacker demanded of the prone form. He prepared to launch another assault then, examining his victim more attentively, pressed a hand to his forehead instead. “Don’t startle me like that, Apprentice – apprentice? No, that was before, I’m a merchant – what are you doing here?”

The other man rose and rooted around in the bag Saphira had tossed him. Lighting a dark, slender roll of leaves with the tip of a finger, he held it out. “It is time to relax after your labors, Master Fen…”

He gave the proffered leaf a suspicious glance, then snatched it greedily and took a deep draw. “Yesss,” he extended the s with his exhale. “Perhaps that is a good idea.” He settled himself in the shade of his wagon. “A good idea indeed.”

Dali Fen Siri Trator’s once upon a time apprentice resumed his once upon a time sane master’s perusal of the ruins with more purpose. As his investigations concluded he sighed to himself. “Legitimate merchants,” he murmured. “It will take some time – and money – to hush this up.”

* * *

His curiosity satisfied, Hanen permitted the fire to subside and returned his attention to Skarp’s children. The waggoner had stopped to remove their shackles and their relief at being free was so great that it took them a moment to realize that Klavicus had begun to stir. He muttered a few words, then collapsed into unconsciousness again.

“Did anyone hear that?” Zane asked.

Reign, who had been closest to him, nodded. “To Tyr, by the road,” she repeated confidently. “That’s what he said.”

Hanen and Skarp groaned in unison. The words had been plain to them, and not what Reign had said. “Toward Tyr, but not by the road,” Hanen sighed.

They had far more company than they would have liked as they traveled, and hearing Klavicus properly wouldn’t have allowed them to evade all of it. The cloud of dust behind them was almost certainly the Urikites – probably more hell-bent on capturing the people who had assaulted them and then fled than in apprehending the infamous Preserver – and certainly they would have had a harder time keeping up or even perhaps finding them in the first place off the road. But the buzzards that mysteriously persisted in flying overhead, and the overland dust clouds that kept pace with them even though the road should have given them the advantage were another matter altogether. “Perhaps it does not matter,” Opa Skarp said. “Traveling on foot with the daimon unconscious would be slow and difficult.”

Hanen had his doubts about the not mattering, but kept them to himself. The young people traveled by night and rested by day, and though they were tracked and pursued they remained unmolested for nearly a week. Hanen and Opa Skarp took it in turns to watch them, each promising to wake the other if anything extraordinary occurred, but as the weary days and nights dragged on the only thing out of the ordinary was the fact that Klavicus showed no signs of regaining consciousness.

Very early on the sixth morning since the youths’ flight from Urik Hanen was awakened by Skarp nudging his shoulder. “They are leaving the road.”

Still dressed, Hanen smoothed his rumpled hair as he headed toward the altar. “Do you know why?”

“From what they’ve said, it appears that they shared the same dream. Dark, disturbing images and a voice telling them – ”

“Toward Tyr, but not by the road?” Hanen interjected. Skarp nodded. “Let me guess, they’re wondering why he changed his mind.”

“They believe it in response to a new threat.”

Hanen took his seat near the altar and observed two clouds of dust, one behind as before and one ahead. “They could be friends, I suppose.”

“Although Regan refused to send a message to Tyr,” Skarp reminded him. Hanen had been a little surprised by that; though apparently the youths were some kind of heroes in this place called Tyr and Zane counseled in favor of it, Regan had communicated their situation to a woman called Mahlanda and no one else. In any case, they took the daimon’s repeated message as a new warning and prepared to abandon the wagon and head overland.

Zane spoke with the driver while the others rigged up a litter to carry the unconscious daimon. “Do you want to come with us?” he asked.

Eyeing the Preserver a little nervously, and their dwindling water reserves even more so, the waggoner shook his head. “I’ll take my chances on the road.”

“Should we – ” the psion hesitated before continuing, “rough you up a little? An empty slaver’s wagon…”

“Aye,” the man concurred with a sigh, “that’s probably for the best. But in any case, they’re more likely after you than me.”

The state of their water was also of concern to the youths; it certainly wasn’t enough to get them to Tyr. “The Vale isn’t too far out of the way,” Kerac pointed out. “And it has water.”

It seemed a good plan; they sent a missive ahead to Desverendi, the druid tender of the Vale, and set out. The night’s travel passed uneventfully, and most of the next day, although they were chased out of an oasis by threatening, animated plants of a kind unfamiliar to Hanen. Dust clouds still paced them to the sides, and the buzzards persisted in advertising their position for miles across the desert, but it wasn’t until the end of the eighth day, shortly after they made camp, that the first real sign of trouble threatened.

They were just finishing a hot meal cooked over a small, protected fire when screams rang out in the night a few hundred yards away, carrying with them the sounds of battle. Fingers twitched toward swords but troubled gazes drifted toward the unconscious Preserver. Finally Regan shook her head. “We have what we need to protect right here.”

No one looked happy, not even Regan, but no one contradicted her, and Zane voiced aloud his agreement. They settled back into a watchful guard, the last remnants of dinner untouched, staring glumly into the fire as the screams reached a crescendo and faded, leaving the subdued crackling of the flames the loudest sound in their region of the desert. Several hours later they were discussing guard rotations and preparing for sleep when the sound of approaching feet put them on alert.

Hanen gasped when four creatures looking like nothing so much as somewhat larger then man-sized, dark-skinned praying mantises stepped cautiously within the fire’s small circle of light. They each held dangerous looking, crystalline throwing wedges in an upper hand and strange, double-bladed polearms in a lower, at the ready but not poised for obvious attack. “What are they?” he exclaimed in horror.

Skarp looked toward him in surprise, then nodded in understanding. “They are called thri-kreen. The gythka,” he pointed toward the polearm, “and the chatkcha are unique to them. They are dangerous foes,” he added as Po and Regan unsheathed weapons and Zane drew on psionic energy to match the humming around the thri-kreen, “as those three have already learned.”

Even in their alien insectoid eyes Hanen could read a confident superiority, of wolves observing sheep, that made him shiver. Skarp’s children stood calm and determined in the face of it, however, and merely asked the thri-kreen their business. The slender necks swiveled toward the dark bundle that was Klavicus motionless by the fire. “You have the Great One with you?” Their speech was difficult to understand, accented with clicks and chirps.

The young people let out a collective sigh, with expressions on their faces that said Does everyone between Urik and Tyr know where we are and who we’re carrying? “Say no and send them on their way,” Hanen muttered.

“That would be the worst possible response they could make,” Opa Skarp said, “if they wish to avoid a dangerous conflict.”

Zane, Regan and Po nodded suspiciously, keeping a close eye on the thri-kreen as they drew nearer. “What is wrong with him?” they asked.

“We were aiding him in a ritual,” Kerac offered. “It was interrupted.”

“Has he spoken to you?” One of the four probed the Preserver’s face, neck and torso with long, delicate fingers.

“Only once. He has been unconscious the rest of the time.”

The thri-kreen gently lifted an eyelid then let it fall shut again. “Has he spoken to you?” He sounded even more impatient and disdainful, though Hanen was surprised that was possible.

“We did share a dream,” Kerac said.

“Only one?” The youths nodded. The thri-kreen conferred among themselves briefly, then the one who had been examining Klavicus said, “We will assist you in attempting another.”

Hanen looked over at Opa Skarp. “They aren’t actually going to go to sleep with those – things – awake in their vicinity, are they? What’s to keep the insects from slitting their throats and carrying Klavicus away?”

“The children are the appointed guardians of the daimon. If they hold him in high esteem, the thri-kreen,” he put emphasis on the name, giving Hanen a reproachful look, “would sooner cut off one of their own limbs than harm them.”

The bard shook his head. “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around anyone treating Klavicus with god-like reverence. What has he done?”

He didn’t really expect the laconic priest to answer, so his disappointment when the man didn’t was fairly minimal. The thri-kreen took up a slow chanting while the youths settled into sleep. They awakened less than an hour later. “That was the Vale!” Sugar Primrose exclaimed as she sat up.

“Good to know we’re supposed to be going where we were going anyway,” Regan remarked dryly. “I’ll tell Desverendi we’re coming.”

“We will accompany the Great One,” the thri-kreen announced. It wasn’t a question, and earned them several sharp glances, but no one tried to stop them. Enlightened self-interest may have played a part in their decision: the thri-kreen told them that the screaming they’d heard had been a group of travelers attacked by Black Sand Raiders coming from the vicinity of Tyr.

“Black Sand Raiders?” Hanen asked.

“Former slaves,” Skarp explained, “who escaped and took to their captors’ profession.”

“Lovely,” the bard murmured as he watched Regan demanding a description of their victims. The thri-kreen were evasive, saying that one human looked much like another to them, but one woman stuck out in their minds.

“Alentha,” Regan growled. “She was going to meet us. Who won the combat? Were there any survivors?” When she learned that the raiders had prevailed and there were no survivors, she kicked at the sand and then stood scowling over Klavicus as if Alentha’s death were somehow his fault.

Hanen slumped in his chair as they finished breaking camp and resumed their trek to the elemental druid Desverendi’s hidden vale. “More hours watching shadowy shapes trudge through a gods-forsaken wasteland,” he sighed.

“Rest if you like. I will watch.”

The bard’s attention was fixed on one shadowy shape in particular, the sole thread connecting the life he’d once lived and the one he found himself thrust into now. Only exhaustion could drive him to lose sight of it, and he wasn’t exhausted yet. “I’m fine,” he insisted. But he knew that he wasn’t.

]]> http://waywally.com/dnd/2010/01/21/rebirth/feed/ 0 http://waywally.com/dnd/2010/01/04/adrift-on-strange-tides/ http://waywally.com/dnd/2010/01/04/adrift-on-strange-tides/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:42:30 +0000 Psydney http://waywally.com/dnd/?p=544 [I was going to wrap this into whatever happened next session, but we've taken a bit longer break and Skip thought a recap might be useful...]

When Urikite officials burst in from every door, Mahlanda remembered what Klavicus had told her. If anything goes wrong, don’t tarry in the city. She suspected she could have escaped in the initial confusion, but couldn’t bring herself to leave.

Skarp’s youths had been all business from the moment Klavicus arrived and even before: Kerac focused on performing the ritual, the others on ensuring the ritual continued uninterrupted. Too many of the Veiled Alliance, however, treated it like some kind of spectacle. She had intended to remain on guard too, but Klavicus gave her a moment’s pointed glance and reluctantly she sat.

She was supposed to be inconspicuous, no more acquainted with him than anyone else, and so she sat and played at seeing a spectacle too. She watched as the mages who knew him even tangentially scurried to obey his orders or to stay out of his way. She watched as the mages who didn’t know him still observed him carefully, curious mutters and even a few laughs stilled as the mismatch between man and shadow sank in. She watched the clerics puff up with pride and self-importance as they realized their role as foci in the ritual, then wilt under Klavicus’ sharp criticisms.

Except for Kerac, who performed his duties gravely and precisely under both praise and censure. He would some day, she suspected, become a Preserver in the truest sense of the word – not merely refraining from wanton destruction, as so many of the Veiled Alliance were wont to do – but actively nurturing the world around him. She looked at Sugar Primrose’s staff, a bit of life and growth that she carried with her wherever she went, and wondered if she understood the miracle of the thing. Purity turns to sand in your hand…Opa Skarp’s words came back to her. Perhaps better – perhaps necessary – that the young druid didn’t understand, that none of them did. Don’t think, only act.

Her own thoughts grew increasingly gloomy as the ritual continued, through two hours, then three, then four, and Klavicus’ condition didn’t help her mood. The shadow on the wall flickered and shifted, to much whispered comment from the assembled crowd, the horns shrinking and then disappearing entirely, the bat wings flexing and folding and finally outspreading into something more feathered and fragile. She gripped the edge of the table until her knuckles whitened, drawing a curious look from a nearby mage, and with an effort she relaxed her hand. In this little play in which she was both actor and spectator the man at the center of the rite was a curiosity, not an individual in whom she was ever more personally and deeply invested.

None of them knew the balor as she did, as she had to pretend she did not, and though that was little enough in truth it was enough to know that not just the shadow was fragile. Whatever he was doing – and she pushed away the wish that he had trusted her enough to tell her – it was plainly consuming nearly all of what she had thought before then were nearly inexhaustible reserves. This Klavicus couldn’t cut a leisurely path through Kalak’s templars in Tyr. Without the elemental currents sustaining him, she doubted if he could hold himself upright. Jaggo’s wards had better hold. I wish I’d checked them myself, no matter what the Preserver said about –

As if to mock her the Urikite officials flooded the room then, the wards serving as neither barrier nor warning, and though Klavicus had told her to flee she rose to his defense, to stand with Skarp’s youths and die with them if need be, to grant the utterly defenseless daimon whatever precious moments she could. But before the Urikites had time to do more than launch an initial salvo, before she had time to cast a single spell, a wave of energy cascaded from Klavicus that stilled every enemy in sight. She nearly laughed aloud at her presumption. Apparently the balor at his weakest was still stronger than anyone – perhaps everyone – in the room. She supposed she should have known.

But not immortal. He had told her that. And as the sword the lieutenant commander held in his hand erupted in violent keening, as it wrested itself from its wielder’s paralyzed hand and launched itself at the balor, her fears for him sharpened anew.  She cried out in warning, and though he clearly saw the blade – from his expression she thought he clearly feared the blade – he was unwilling or unable to move as it embedded itself deep within his flesh. And as the region around the wound seemed to contract to a point, a still center that moments later blossomed outward in a violent explosion, she understood – perhaps too late – why he had ordered her to go.

* * *

Hanen watched in bewilderment at the events unfolding before them. He was so tired that his vision would have been unsteady even if Opa Skarp hadn’t been shaking him. Gathering his last strength he pushed the man away. “Give me a minute.”

“You don’t understand what’s at stake,” Skarp snapped.

Hanen gave him a cool glare. “You’re right. I don’t have a clue in the Nine Hells, about this or much of anything else. You haven’t spent the last few weeks being particularly illuminating.”

The cleric’s agitation faded as rapidly as it had come. Though he said nothing, he returned a hand to the bard’s shoulder, warm and steady and somehow invigorating. Hanen found he could focus again.

It was coming back to him now, the things Klavicus had taught him about gleaning stories from Earth and Air, Water and Fire. These altars were more uncommunicative than the ones he remembered in Greyhawk, but there was some information they were willing to share. The names of the youths, for one, what training they’d received, what role they were to play in the shaping of Oerth’s future. The Earth altar in particular wished to speak of little else. To Hanen’s ears it all had a familiar, peculiarly unpleasant ring.

Skarp was staring in puzzlement at their huddled band, as well he might. Though they themselves looked much as they had before, the weapons they carried had grown strange. The daggers the warrior Reign wielded – Hanen had noticed them in particular because the etched tiger fang and claw jogged memories of a man he once knew – now resembled talons blurred by rapid motion. Kerac’s earth symbol glowed brightly and Hanen could see tendrils of power snaking away from it, acting as anchors to another place; he suspected anyone other than the cleric would have a hard time even lifting it. Zane’s orb had undergone a kind of fission: two spheres, one dark and one bright, danced a tight orbit where one had been. The highest and lowest strings of the bard Saphira’s harp had detached themselves and wound around her forearms, ready for use as garrotes. The druid’s staff bloomed with stars rather than primroses now; the paladin’s sword was a feather, the avenger’s a moonbeam. Hanen had a feeling it all meant something, but he couldn’t puzzle out what.

The young people’s agitation was growing as the speck of light receded from them at a pace more rapid than they could follow. They could, in fact, not follow at all: every effort at forward motion found them advanced not one foot ahead. It was Zane, perhaps because of his unshakeable faith in the power of his mind, who thought to will himself forward rather than walking. Reign laughed nervously as she lagged behind the others, accustomed to instinctual rather than analytical action; with a faint smile Kerac dropped back to pull her along.

“That matches Thanatos,” Hanen muttered. “But how did he get there?”

The youths’ small levity was already faded as the spark of light still outpaced them, soon vanishing completely behind a high tower in the near distance. For lack of a better alternative, they headed in that direction. As they grew nearer its lineaments looked familiar to Hanen; he had a nagging conviction that he should know what it was.

When they entered the stables he did recognize the mounts waiting within. Ebon and glossy as obsidian, taller and more massive than the sturdiest draft horse, red eyes glowing with fire and a fearsome intelligence, the Black were not a sight anyone who had seen them was likely to forget. He leaned forward. “Five. Where is the sixth?”

Opa Skarp was staring at them in wonder, as well he might. “What are they?” he asked the bard.

Hanen struggled to explain. Without knowledge of the Abyss, without an understanding of the the multiverse, with no conception of interplanar travel, where was he to begin? He was dismayed when the problem proved more fundamental than that. “What is a ‘horse?’” Skarp asked.

An incipient horror was suppressed when the Black spoke to the youths. “You must go to him.”

“We’re trying,” they replied. “But he’s out of sight.”

“We will take you, on the fast roads. But understand what you must do. He is dying, but cannot die. You must finish it.”

They glanced at one another uneasily, but nodded in acquiescence and mounted. Even two to a Black, there was ample room to ride. The horses sped away, across the barren plain.

Skarp wanted to follow the youths, but Hanen’s gaze lingered on the tower, and suddenly he remembered: it was Spinecastle, the seat of the paladin Clement’s power at least until Hanen’s dying day and doubtless beyond. “Spinecastle. But no demon would recreate that bastion of righteousness on Thanatos,” he muttered aloud, “not even in bitter amusement. And the Black would never sit meekly in an Abyssal stable, where they’d been captive so long in the past.”

Fragments of memory intruded on his thoughts with an almost physical force. Klavicus and his sadistic chess set, drawn from nowhere and returned there when the game was done. Trapped “treasure” chests that would suck an unwary gold hunter to the Plane of Shadow if he was lucky, to the Elemental Plane of Fire if he weren’t. The Grey Pelican’s reputation as the premier destination inn of all Greyhawk, in no small part because the well-heeled could lease nothing so mundane as a suite, but rather an entire pocket plane. Klavicus had always sculpted the multiverse the way a potter sculpted clay. “He’s pulled them into a demiplane,” the bard murmured.

“Explain,” Skarp said sharply. Hanen jumped; for a moment he’d forgotten the cleric was there.

“It’s a space created from a – projection – of Klavicus’ will.”

The cleric’s brow furrowed. “He has drawn them into his mind?”

Hanen shook his head. If only the man weren’t so ignorant… “No, it has more tangible reality than that. Now that it has been made, if you or I knew where it was we could go there ourselves, without its maker willing our presence.” A certain expression crossed Skarp’s face. “And no, I don’t know where it is and they – ” he gestured toward the elemental altar, “aren’t talking. Whatever needs to be done there,” he shifted focus back to the young people, “it’s theirs to do.”

Both men grew quiet as the Black raced toward a strangely shaped mountain; only as they drew nearer did Hanen recognize it as Klavicus, grown taller than the tallest peak on Oerth. Blood flowed from a wound like lava from a volcanic fissure. The sight confirmed his belief that the balor, in his duress, had created a demiplane – perhaps against his conscious intent, or perhaps not. The youths seemed discomfited, but listened attentively as the Black gave their final instructions. “Go to the heart. Kill him. It is his desire.” And then they were gone.

The young people began to climb. When they reached the rent in his side they paused for a time to inspect the damage. “Maybe we can fix this,” Zane mused.

“They said we were supposed to kill him,” Kerac pointed out.

“Why should we believe them?” the psion asked.

Kerac shrugged. “Good point.” He probed the gaping wound carefully, with a light touch, spoke a few tentative words of power.

Skarp reached out a hand to the air. “They’re trying to heal him,” he breathed, surprise evident on his face.

Hanen looked at him sharply. “Why wouldn’t they?”

The other man’s face grew closed, almost rocklike, again, and he did not reply.

By then Kerac had turned back to his companions with a frown. “It’s hopeless. It would take dozens of clerics casting hundreds of spells to repair this damage. And I’m not sure that would be enough.”

Po tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword. “Then let’s go.” One after another they slipped into the bloody fissure.

They had not traveled far when the first attack came. “Barlgura and evistro,” Hanen announced. Skarp glanced at him, uncomprehending. The bard gestured toward a creature perched near the ceiling of the space they had entered. “The barlgura is the one that looks like a demented orangutan.” He pointed to two other creatures charging the party. “The evistro are the doglike ones.” Panic tinged his disquiet when he realized that the cleric was not only unfamiliar with barlgura and evistro, but with orangutans and dogs as well. Where am I? Why am I?

“If it is a place of his own creation,” Skarp asked, “and he wishes this thing to be done, why is it peopled with enemies?”

Although the others were earthbound now, Po retained the skill of flight and moved to engage the barlgura while the others battled the evistro. Klavicus had probably commanded hundreds, if not thousands, of such beings before retiring from the Abyss and his own demonic nature. Hanen thought he knew why they appeared now. “He was impossibly ancient when we first met,” he said, only half to the cleric, “and his grip on life was tenacious. He would struggle within himself, even if necessity dictated…” he trailed off. It was nearly impossible to imagine a world without the old balor. He wished he hadn’t awakened to it.

“You are right,” Skarp’s glance was oddly shrewd and calculating, “of course.”

Skarp’s “children” fought off the barlgura and evistro, made their way through what looked like an intestinal tract and emerged at the edge of a wide body of foul, greenish fluid that could only be within the demon’s stomach. Zane sent a tiny astral spider to explore some irregularities at the opposite reaches of the lake; no sooner had it arrived than a black dragon reared up from the depths. It was not large, as black dragons went, but deadly enough.

Reign chided him for disturbing it, but even as Zane suggested deferring discussion of blame until later and Po tried to herd everyone away from the vicinity of the acid waters the dragon sent several minions to cut off their path of retreat, following at a more leisurely pace itself.

Sensitive to the peculiarity of their position, Saphira tried to avoid the conflict before it began, and with inimitable bardic charm asked the dragon, “Is there anything we can do to help you?”

He stared at her, considering, then broke into a smile. “Yes, there is.” She looked up at him, calmly encouraging. “Go throw yourselves into the acid. I’m hungry.”

Hanen couldn’t stifle a snort; any lingering doubts he had that the space they occupied was some projection of the balor’s mind dissipated. A dragon’s claws might rend them, a dragon’s breath choke them, but with that retort the animus behind the creature was most certainly Klavicus.

The battle was vicious but relatively brief; if it hadn’t been they might not have survived. They scattered as much as they could to avoid its toxic breath, and Po, still flight worthy, hovered ready in case anyone else besides him was tossed into the acid water. When it was over they continued toward the thorax via a more punishing climb up the ribcage. “They’re near the heart,” Hanen murmured.”If they can reach it, it will be over soon.”

“What will happen to the daimon?” Skarp asked.

Hanen spared only a moment’s bemusement over the cleric’s pronunciation of demon. “I have no idea.” He couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud what seemed to him the most likely scenario. And then Klavicus will be gone.

“And the children?” Skarp’s tone took on somewhat more urgency.

“I can only see two possible outcomes there. If Klavicus – ” he still couldn’t say the word dies, “if his consciousness fails, the demiplane will collapse. Any corporeal occupants will either be ejected – or not.” He didn’t think Skarp would take much comfort in knowing that if they were expelled back into the room from whence they’d come, they’d likely find themselves caught in the balor’s death throes and unlikely to survive the explosive conflagration.

So he didn’t mention it, and mostly managed to stifle his groan as a flame-like creature blocked their forward advance. Hanen recognized the being. Some part of the balor might believe he needed to die. But the rest of him wasn’t going to make it easy.

So he made a sheltered camp alone and meditated, and watched the progress of Skarp’s brood in the flames of his fire. “They take their sweet time coming,” he grumbled as they pressed on, if not at a leisurely pace then certainly not at an urgent one, half-absorbed in their own concerns.

At great personal cost Po revitalized the Sword of Camelok – Klavicus could guess who had an intangible hand in that – and rechristened it the Harbinger of Light. Do those things still please you – Avangion? the balor mused as Po dedicated the blade to his god. Once upon a time you would have crowed from the rooftops, receiving such an honor. And laughed in delight, and forgotten it the next day. He turned the fire’s vision away from the sober, exhausted paladin. But I suppose you put away childish things the day the old archmage died. Perhaps even before then.

When not worrying about Po several of the youths clustered around Regan, who was painstakingly translating Dark Doorways. The work went slowly, not least of all because she spent some of her time trying to explain correspondences between sounds and letters to her companions. She alone of them all had learned to read. And what power would there be in books, to those who seldom see them?

He had lied to the old druid of the vale – or at the very least, been economical with the truth. When the druid insisted as price for his aid that Klavicus wait for Skarp’s children the balor didn’t bother to mention that he had no choice in the matter; he required the symbol of Earth that the young cleric carried for the ritual even to commence. He had found them all, the keepers of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Three already awaited him in Urik, and that in itself had roused interest and some concern among the Alliance, for all of them had to be hidden and housed and if they were discovered by the Urikite authorities…well, best not to think about that.

He might have been more impatient with the delay if he weren’t still uneasy in his mind. He had told the Avangion he wasn’t afraid and that had been a simple truth, but doubts still lingered. He had roared at Mahlanda that he was a balor of the Abyss, but was it true when the Abyss was thousands of years gone? And if he wasn’t, what was he? The oldest living thing on this gods’-forsaken world, he thought with weary resignation. That’s all about myself that I know.

Sitting by the fire he worried again the subject that had for months been uppermost on his mind. Preservers opposed defilers, and defilers were the stronger. But why? The sole conclusion he inevitably returned to was that the preservers somehow acted wrongly. In the old world entropy was an aloof, independent force, and preservation was adequate to shield some things – enough things, important things – from its inexorable grip. But when a being such as the Dragon seized entropy like a whip and flayed the land before him until the flesh exposed the bone, what useful purpose would mere conservation serve?

Every book he saved seemed to be in worse and worse repair, and anything written long after the Dragon’s rise was full of error at best or more likely lies. When he saw which way the winds were blowing he had gathered as many creature comforts as he could – art and alcohol, books and good food and tobacco – and thought to weather the storm.

But millennia passed and where was he now? He, like the other preservers, scurried over the remains of Oerth like a cockroach, searching and finding only smaller and smaller crumbs because no one was left to bake the bread. That was their weakness, their ultimately fatal flaw. Someone must not merely conserve, but repair and renew. Create the conditions for creativity again.

And why should it be left to me? His own unflinching logic reflected the reason back to him: because there was no one else. The oldest living thing on this gods’-forsaken world, and the only one save the Avangion who truly remembers. The counterbalances of misused entropy were all gone now. Vir, Pendragon, K’Nayde and all the rest. Even Tenser – much as Klavicus despised the archmage, he had thought him indomitable. But in the end the Dragon destroyed him too. There is no one else.

Undo the damage, the Avangion had told him. One ritual, and you could make a beginning. The Earth’s children could paint a new picture of the world. But the canvas requires repair.

In the fire’s vision they had come upon a lone wagon now, rocking unevenly with a single mismatched wheel, belonging to the merchant Dali Fen Siri Trator. Klavicus knew of him, had spoken to him once. He was a puzzle, a merchant who crisscrossed the desert wastes without guards and yet still largely unmolested.

Perhaps it was his cargo: he accepted commissions to haul merchandise from one city to another, but his personal trade tended more toward what in centuries long gone might have been referred to as “recreational pharmaceuticals,” and in this world even more than that one momentary escape was a welcome thing.

Perhaps it was his tendency to indulge in his cargo, granting him the aura of a holy fool: already the youths were shaking their heads at one another as he stared with incomprehension at Kerac for offering to “repair” his wagon. “That would spoil the beat!” he exclaimed.

The Veiled Alliance had loaded him up with spices in Urik and sent him on his way, directly on a path toward Skarp’s brood. Entry into the tightly controlled city, never a simple matter, had grown more difficult since the war, and they hoped to provide the young people with an excuse – although why the Alliance thought a pack of heavily armed mercenaries would load themselves down with spices Klavicus couldn’t fathom.

And they might not have, if Fen hadn’t beseeched them to relieve him of some annoying, unsalable “cutlery” he’d acquired in a hazed past. Reign’s eyes widened at the sight of them: a pair of the rare weapons once known as kukri, etched with a tiger claw and a tiger fang. Kerac and Po balked at paying the single silver piece Fen requested for such a valuable weapon, but Reign and Zane were disinclined to let on its true value lest he refuse to sell them at all. As a compromise Sugar Primrose suggested purchasing his spices and sandalwood supply; to a few raised eyebrows Regan inquired into the cost of his narcotics as well.

Their transactions completed they went their way as Fen went his. That meant that Kerac and the others would arrive in Urik soon. It was time to finish gathering the remainder of what the ritual required. The ritual. New canvases. He had asked the Avangion few questions about the ritual. Fewer than he should have, perhaps, but in truth he didn’t want to know. He rose and kicked out the fire. He was a balor of the Abyss. He was no paladin. But he was also not a beggar. Or a maggot picking over others’ fetid leavings. Enough is enough.

When he returned to Urik he steered away from the Veiled Alliance faction leaders vying for his attention and found a mage called Jaggo who held himself largely neutral from the power struggles to aid his final preparations. Though human interaction was still painful for her – the grim thought occurred that perhaps he had succeeded too well at that little project – Mahlanda had offered herself as go between. “Out of the question,” he had replied. “I don’t want anyone aware of our acquaintance, for my safety,” his voice softened a little, “and for yours. If anything goes wrong, don’t tarry in the city.”

“What could go wrong?” she asked.

“If I could enumerate it, I could prevent it.” He sounded more irritable than he’d intended, but she accepted both that decision and his order to find herself a different inn until after the rite’s conclusion with no apparent ill will.

And without his prompting she found ways to make herself useful. Once he returned to Urik he was blind to events he couldn’t see with his eyes, but she contrived to keep him apprised of the young people’s movements. At the gate they paid the ten gold a head fee to avoid Urik’s peacebonding laws. Good. At Zane’s counsel they gave false names. Even better: being the heroes of Tyr would not gain them much currency in Urik. They registered as merchants at the appropriate office. They made their way to the gate guard’s recommended tavern, the King’s Sword Inn, but seemed to find it too crowded with Urik authorities for their taste and after a leisurely ale made their way elsewhere. A Veiled Alliance representative met them at their new destination in the guise of a trader. They were on their way.

It was time for Klavicus to be on his way as well, then. Jaggo assured him, using far too many words, that the passages to the ritual room had been secured with enough wards to prevent an ant from entering unnoticed. Yes, the braziers were in place, and the pedestals as he had specified. “And the invitations have gone out to – ”

Klavicus grabbed him by the throat and lifted him onto his toes. “The what?”

At first the Veiled Alliance mage could do no more than gag; the balor released his hold only enough to let him speak. “With – with – s–s-such an august p-p-p-personage, and s–s-such an important occasion – ”

“Did I ask you to send out invitations?” His voice had grown dangerously soft.

“No, but – ”

“You have ten seconds to explain before I crush the life out of you.”

Jaggo’s eyes bulged, not merely from restricted air flow. “With – with Morlac gone and the Alliance fracturing, I thought everyone could use a reminder – ”

Klavicus let go so abruptly that the mage stumbled and fell to his knees. “Don’t think in my vicinity again,” he snapped. Rubbing his throat and trembling the mage rose, bowed repeatedly and then hurried away.

Standing on the other side of the door as Jaggo made his introductions, Klavicus could hear the twin notes of smugness and fear. The Preserver had come to him for aid. Then the Preserver had nearly killed him. When the mage told the assembled company not to annoy their distinguished guest, at least it was certain that he meant it from the heart.

Klavicus opened the door and stepped through, then swore softly to himself. Too many people; there were far too many people. Many of them were milling about trading absurd rumors. Mahlanda stood apart, and Skarp’s young people had already taken up wary guard positions near the three doors to the chamber, although Regan was also glaring at the mage Alentha with a ferocity that suggested the latter had used her “orb of identification” to verify their integrity. She had tried that on him at their initial meeting, and after lecturing her in deliberately excruciating detail on the nature of its construction and the utter gratuitousness of the pain it inflicted during the identification process, smiled sweetly and asked her how well she thought it would function when ground to a powder. He was gratified to see that she gave him a wide berth when he entered.

The four clerics were eyeing the braziers and pedestals, as well they might. He had planned to explain something of what he intended, but there were too many people for that. There were too many people to even get their attention. Scowling, he maintained his human illusion – swarthy, long-haired, more physically developed perhaps than the average mage – but sculpted his shadow into his true form. Silence descended blessedly quickly when the assembled audience realized that a horned head hovered over them on the ceiling, and that massive bat-like wings spread over two of the walls. “This will take some time,” he announced. “Several hours at the least. You might want to sit down.” He gestured to the four clerics. “Except for you.”

Most everyone complied, including Mahlanda after a moment’s hesitation. Reign, Po and Regan remained standing, weapons drawn, disinterested in Jaggo’s assurances regarding wards. Zane stood by Po, humming with psionic energy, and Saphira and Sugar Primrose waited watchfully in the corner most remote from any entrance, Saphira playing her harp and singing softly. Klavicus positioned the four clerics, each at a brazier, and instructed them to withdraw their elemental amulets. Of the four, only Kerac’s was whole. The balor sighed to himself; he had been expecting as much, had provided for such a contingency, but the effort of reassembling the broken fragments was going to require energy that he suspected he would need for the ritual itself.

As soon as Kerac saw a depression to receive the amulet he fitted the symbol within it. His anticipation would cause no actual harm to the rite, but it was a bad habit to get into, and Klavicus tapped him sharply on the shoulder, growling, “Don’t presume.” The priest looked up guiltily, but the balor had already moved on, scolding the other clerics for the condition of their shattered amulets.

Moving from pedestal to pedestal he summoned the element proper to each to repair the holy symbol, ignoring the soft, astonished murmurs of the crowd. Barely more than a conjurer’s trick, he rumbled to himself. But then, they’re barely more than children.

The mending concluded, he admonished the clerics to focus their attention, not to waver or falter until the ceremony was ended. Then he paused for a moment, staring at the center point of intersection between the pedestals, between the priests. The Avangion spoke in glittering generalities of repair and renewal, but Klavicus knew damned well what he really meant. There was still time to walk away. He was no paladin, no planetar, no paragon. He was a balor of the Abyss.

With a silent snarl, he stepped forward.

* * *

Deep beneath Spinecastle, the Galeb Duhr and Opa Skarp stood on opposing sides of a stone slab on which a man lay. He was a handsome man in his middle years, softly waved brown hair touched with grey at the temples and good muscle tone. He was not breathing.

The room was lit faintly by torches and more brightly by a shimmering pattern of light hovering at the foot of the slab. This is a mistake, the Avangion spoke into their minds. The Preserver has Mahlanda. He chose her himself.

The Galeb Duhr’s voice rumbled the very foundations of the castle. “She does not understand. Not fully. Perhaps she could in time, but we have not the time. Thanks to you.”

The Avangion’s light shrank a little, but he did not immediately reply. The Galeb Duhr knew as well as he that Klavicus could be neither bullied nor tricked into anything, and if the Avangion had wrapped an unpleasant inevitability in a pretty package for the balor to ease thinking of the implications – well, he had been doing that since long before – but he shrank from the painful memories of his past life, of corporeality. If Klavicus went to Urik, then he believed there was no one else to take up the burden, and no more time to wait. He looked down with some sympathy at the naked, dead man. This is not the solution.

“It is the only one left to us.” Opa Skarp’s tone was flat, factual. “The road ahead will be difficult. The daimon will require someone who understands him as he copes with change.”

And if this one cannot cope with the changes you will thrust on him? The Avangion’s thoughts were sharp in their minds. You may do no more than saddle the Preserver with a madman.

“Does that mean you will not aid us?”

The light bobbed uncertainly, tracing the circumference of the large cavern before returning. If we fight among ourselves, if we withhold our power from one another, we do the Dragon’s work for him. I believe this is wrong. But I believe in your sincerity. I will aid you.

Skarp bowed. “Our thanks.”

The Avangion approached the lifeless body, letting his light shine upon it. He hovered still for long minutes, then his luminescent wingtips fluttered in the faintest of motions. A breeze began to stir, motes of light within it swirling about the man in tighter and tighter circles until they formed a mask above his face. His head jerked upwards. He took one breath, and another.

It is done, the Avangion said. And then he was gone.

* * *

The man awoke to the feeling that he shouldn’t be waking at all. He was warm at least, and dry. He had fallen in a cold rain, on a dark, empty street in Greyhawk…He opened his eyes. He was in a bed, in a cavernous space, with an elderly man sitting beside him. Was it a man? There was something about his face…skin almost too cragged and chiseled to be flesh. If its expression wasn’t precisely kind, at least it wasn’t hostile either. The other man was speaking now, though it took him long moments to understand the words. “Do you remember who you are?”

The man raised a slow hand to his chest, touching the region over his heart. He remembered an explosion of pain and then…nothing. “I’m dead.”

Shaking his head slightly, the rock-like man tried again. “Do you remember your name?”

Now he touched the hand to his head. His thoughts felt as though someone had removed and crushed them to a powder, then blown the powder back into his skull. But there were a few cohering fragments. “Hanen,” he replied hesitantly. “My name was Hanen.” I was – am? – was – a bard. He tried to rise on an elbow, but failed. “Who are you?”

“You may call me Opa Skarp.”

“Where am I?” He turned his head as far as the pillows would permit. “This isn’t the Grey Pelican.”

“You are at the home of a friend.”

Hanen gave him a suspicious glance. “Whose friend?”

“Yours. Do you remember one named Klavicus?”

“Klavicus? Of course I remember – ” he broke off. He did remember Klavicus. Had he been a friend? Perhaps, come to that, in his way he had. “Where is he? Where is this place?”

Skarp laid a hand on his chest. It was strangely warm, strangely heavy. “You must rest a little more.” Before he could protest, Hanen was asleep.

The next week proceeded much the same, long intervals of sleep and bouts of consciousness, during which he ate strange foods, drank strange beverages and attempted to question the individual who called himself Opa Skarp and received precious few useful replies – although he did gather the man was a cleric, there to nurse him back to health. Every day Hanen asked where Klavicus was, and every day the man replied that he hoped to see his return soon.

By the second week he felt strong enough to sit up, even to walk a little. One day when Skarp was out – gathering water, he said, and though a look out the windows made it plain that Klavicus had taken the eccentric step of relocating to the Bright Desert Hanen wondered that the balor hadn’t contrived to produce a cistern somehow – he wandered over to the elemental altars.

They at least were familiar, if much larger than the set the balor had constructed deep below the Grey Pelican, and his best hope of determining the truth of Skarp’s claims; if they worked on the same principles as their predecessors. He also didn’t know if Skarp would object to his making use of them, but acting on the old, reliable principle of asking forgiveness rather than permission he took a deep breath and concentrated.

A man was pacing in front of a fire in a large, richly decorated room. It was definitely Klavicus as Hanen remembered him, although his face was tight with strain and there were wrinkles – yes, those were wrinkles worn by worry across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. In all the time Hanen had known him, Klavicus never worried about anything. He didn’t care enough to worry. It was not a reassuring sight. “Where are you?” he murmured to the rippling air displaying the balor’s image. “And where am I? Why am I?”

Klavicus was cocking his head as if listening to something, then caught up a cloak and left the room. He made his way to a tavern, ordered a drink from the innkeeper, left it untouched and slipped into the back. Rapping on a keg in a certain pattern revealed a secret passage, and he made a swift, stealthy way down dark corridors with an easy familiarity. He paused outside a door for a few moments, then entered a space crowded with robed men and women and half a dozen heavily armed youths watching alertly at its three entryways. Paraphernalia for some kind of ritual stood in the center of the room; from the uneasy silence that descended shortly after his arrival, the balor was a key player in the rite.

“I am not certain you should have done this,” Skarp said as he came up behind him. He had not heard the cleric return.

Hanen’s eyes narrowed in suspicion once again. “What’s going on? Where is Klavicus, and what is he doing?”

Skarp held out a hand. “You are still tired, you should – ”

Hanen slapped the hand away. “Don’t touch me. I mean to understand what’s happening here, whether you’re willing to tell me or not.”

It was a threat with no teeth and he knew it – he wasn’t strong enough to fight the sturdy cleric if the man chose to oppose him – but with another small shake of his head Skarp merely set a chair beside him and sat down.

By then four individuals stood at four pedestals, clearly channeling some sort of energy. After a long pause and a complicated play of expression on his face that Hanen didn’t entirely understand Klavicus stepped between the pedestals and stood centered in their midst.

Hanen and Skarp watched as the four clerics stood in unwavering concentration with the old balor the still point in the center. After the first hour Hanen felt fatigue tugging at him, after the fourth he was nearing exhaustion, but he couldn’t tear himself away for even a short rest. Though Klavicus had entered the room cloaked in a human illusion his demonic form was shadowed on the walls, and as the hours passed it began to change. The prominent horns began to shrink, then vanished altogether. The bat-like wings grew feathered, almost like a solar’s, though Hanen could not help but laugh at the thought. Whatever the demon was doing, it certainly wasn’t that.

He wished he knew what the balor was trying to accomplish. It was taking an unimaginably long time. He was not reassured by Skarp’s tense expression, and even less when he finally spoke aloud. “It is wrong,” the cleric muttered, Hanen’s presence apparently forgotten. “It is failing. Whatever he is or was fights the change.”

“What is failing?” Hanen asked sharply. “What is changing?”

Any reply Skarp might have been willing to make was interrupted by a burst of activity in the distant room. Every entrance boiled with armed and uniformed shapes, ordinary men and half-giants trying to force their way in and finding their progress impeded by the youths who had been standing guard. “Do not let them disrupt the ritual, children!” Skarp cried out, although they could not possibly hear him.

A sturdy middle-aged man bearing insignias of authority on his uniform – Hanen would recognize the trappings of dominion in any time or place – strode into the room with the easy swagger of an individual expecting no real resistance. He seemed surprised by the grim-faced youth who blocked his path, long sword held at a confrontational angle, but still spoke as if he were master of the situation. “This is an unauthorized gathering. Surrender and you will not be harmed.” He looked toward the four clerics. “Stop what you are doing.”

“Unauthorized?” Hanen echoed.

“Urik is under martial law,” Skarp said. “And they have no love for mages.”

Hanen was about to ask what Urik was, and why anyone would enforce a blanket ban on mages, when the young people went on the offensive. They didn’t require anyone to tell them to protect the clerics and the balor. A lightly armored man hummed with psionic energy and an astral being burst into existence before an enemy mage – apparently these Urikites didn’t dislike all mages, only the ones who weren’t theirs – but too late to prevent a projectile from leaving his fingertips and heading directly at one of the clerics.

“Kerac…” Skarp breathed as the arcane bullet struck him. The young cleric stumbled, and Klavicus with him, but with clenched jaw and a look of intense concentration the cleric regained his balance and his focus. The rite continued, but it was impossible to believe it could do so much longer. A few mages joined the defense, but they were sorely outnumbered.

A sudden burst of energy from Klavicus brought everything to a literal standstill: while the room’s initial occupants were all free to move about the intruders were all frozen in place. “Kill them!” the woman by the trap door called out; none of the youths needed much urging.

But before more than one of them could strike a single blow the weapon the officer held began to emit a sound. Hanen recognized the blade’s distinctive keening; it filled him with dread. “That’s a demon-slaying sword,” he exclaimed. He half rose from his chair as if he thought to intervene. “Klavicus!”

Klavicus’ head snapped toward the wailing as the blade struggled free of its wielder’s unwilling hand and flew toward him, but he was unable or unwilling to move. For the first time in all the years Hanen had known him the balor looked afraid. He turned his face aside; watching seemed obscene somehow.

A bright burst of light tempted his gaze back. The guards were gone. The room was gone. All that remained was a point of white light rapidly receding into the distance against a backdrop of igneous rock and lava streams. Hanen slumped in his chair. “So much for seeing him.”

“What do you mean?” Skarp asked.

The bard gestured toward the unfolding scene. “That’s Thanatos.” He expected that to explain everything, but Skarp’s puzzled look suggested that he hadn’t. What kind of cleric is he? “On the Abyss?” Still no sign of comprehension. “Surely you’re aware that when an extraplanar being is ‘killed’ somewhere other than his home plane, he is banished back to that plane for a period of some decades. Only if he dies there is he truly dead.”

No glimmer of understanding was dawning in the cleric’s eyes. “What is ‘extraplanar?’”

Hanen’s thoughts spun violently enough to make him physically dizzy for a moment. How could the man not know – ? “Oh no,” he groaned. “Not again. Mordenkainen and Crusader and the others were supposed to prevent this…how long?” He sat upright in his chair. “And what happens if a demon dies – ?” No wonder the balor had looked afraid.

He felt Skarp’s hand on his shoulder. He supposed he was going to put him to sleep again. If this was what he had awakened to, he supposed he didn’t care. Instead the cleric shook him gently. “Please focus on the children.”

“What children?” Hanen muttered, but shifted the view around until a collection of human forms came into view.

“My children,” Skarp replied, speaking the words with an odd note of detachment in his voice. “What is this Thanatos they have been taken to?”

“It can’t be Thanatos,” Hanen said irritably. “Not if you don’t know what the Planes are. Not if the World Seed has been stolen again.”

“Then where are they?” Skarp shook him again. “This is important. Tell me!”